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ST ORRES, Gualala

ABROAD WRITERS’ CONFERENCE has been offering Full-Length Manuscripts Edit & Critique Workshops for Six years. This highly successful workshop has helped numerous writers get their manuscripts published.

This December, we’re planning on holding a special Full or Partial Manuscript Retreat at St. Orres in Gualala, California. We will be accepting both Fiction & Non-Fiction Manuscripts with no page limit.

What makes this event different from our normal workshop?

– The conference will focus specifically on Full Manuscripts. We will not be offering single chapter workshops, just completed work.

Daily Schedule

– 8:00 – 12:00 Daily morning workshops with Jacquelyn Mitchard or Connie May Fowler. Each day, one participant will receive a 4 1/2 hour critique of manuscript from instructor and participants in workshop. Prior to arrival, all participant in workshop must read, edit and write a critique of all participants manuscripts. Workshops will have a maximum of 8 attendees.

– 2:30 – 6:30 Afternoon Craftwork with Guest Authors will be teaching a series of Craft workshops. Workshops various topics such as:Time Present and Time Past in Visual Settings, Tension within a story, Dialogue, Plot, Narrative Structure and Writing about Politics.

At Retreat:

Jeff Kleinman will have, One on One with each participants. They will discuss their manuscript and the possibility of representation. If not with Jeff, whom he would recommend.

– Afternoons are devoted to writing and exploration. St Orres is located on the coast in Mendocino County. This uniquely crafted Russian style hotel is a California landmark. The owner built this magical hotel in the redwoods 45 years ago. magnificent location is rich in wildlife and natural beauty. From your cabin in the woods, you’ll experience the pleasure of being in
one of the most beautiful locations in California.

INSTRUCTORS:

CONNIE MAY FOWLER – Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

JACQUELYN MITCHARD – Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

GUEST AUTHORS:

ETHEL ROHAN – The Art of Tension

Tension is anticipation. Who are the main and secondary characters? What do they need and want? Why do they need and want what they do? How do they go about achieving their desires? What’s in their way? Will they succeed or fail? Story collapses without tension and conflict. There have to be burning motivations, high stakes, and mounting obstacles. In class, we will dissect a sampling of stories and zero in on tension in particular to study the various and most compelling ways it is achieved.

Escape stories that take us totally out of our world and into another.

History has always been a passion, so I’m on the lookout for something that brings the past to life.

A great story can allow you to enter other people’s thoughts and lives – and, when you close the book with a sigh, transform you: maybe you’re a little more grateful, or a little kinder, or a little wiser. I love books that inspire me to become better, smarter, more present. This has been the case with many of the books I’ve represented, and it’s something I seek in new projects. I believe strongly that books can make a difference. Good writing and smart ideas can change our world.

Dining Room

Price:

Single Room in Hotel with shared bathroom $3,150

Choice of staying in a Single Creekside Cabin or an Elegant 2 bedroom Creekside Cottages with private bath $3,350

Spa with Sauna and Hot Tub – Extra fee for Massages

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JOHN BANVILLE will be joining us at the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Kinsale, Ireland, August 6th at Blue Haven Hotel. Tickets will be 15 euros.

William John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, the youngest of three siblings. He was educated at Christian Brothers schools and St Peter’s College, Wexford. After college John worked as a clerk for Ireland’s national airline, Aer Lingus, before joining The Irish Press as a sub-editor in 1969. Continuing with journalism for over thirty years, John was Literary Editor at The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999.

John’s first book, Long Lankin, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, came out in 1971, followed byBirchwood (1973), Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter(1982), Mefisto (1986), The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), Athena(1995), The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), The Sea (2005),The Infinities (2009) and Ancient Light (2012). His non-fiction book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, was published in 2003 as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Writer and the City’ series. In 2012, an anthology comprising extracts from John’s fifteen novels to date, together with selections drawn from his dramatic works and various reviews, was published under the title, Possessed of a Past: A John Banville Reader.

Among the awards John’s novels have won are the Allied Irish Banks fiction prize, the American-Irish Foundation award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, theGuardian Fiction Prize. In 1989 The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was awarded the first Guinness Peat Aviation Award; in Italian, as La Spiegazione dei Fatti, the book was awarded the 1991 Premio Ennio Flaiano. Ghostswas shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Prize 1993; The Untouchable for the same prize in 1997. In 2003 John was awarded the Premio Nonino. He has also received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation in the US. In 2005, John won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Last year, John was awarded the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature.

Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, John has published the following crime novels: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), The Lemur (2008), Elegy for April (2010), A Death in Summer (2011) and Vengeance (2012). Later this year, Mantle will publish Holy Orders, the sixth book in the Quirke series. The first three have been adapted by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson for the BBC, and will be broadcast later this autumn, starring Gabriel Byrne in the title role.

John (again writing as Benjamin Black) has also been commissioned by theRaymond Chandler Estate to pen a new Philip Marlowe novel which will be published by Holt in the US in 2014.

After leaving Oxford, Sarah Gristwood began work as a journalist, writing at first about the theatre as well as general features on everything from gun control to Giorgio Armani. But increasingly she found herself specialising in film interviews – Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro; Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney. She has appeared in most of the UK’s leading newspapers – The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) – and magazines from Sight and Sound to The New Statesman.

Turning to history she wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Bird of Paradise: The colourful career of the first Mrs Robinson which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. She also published a book on iconic dresses, Fabulous Frocks (with Jane Eastoe); and a 50th anniversary companion to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as well as co-authoring The Ring and the Crown, a book on the history of royal weddings. Her most recent non-fiction books are Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe (2016) Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (2012) and The Story of Beatrix Potter (2016). She has also published a historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror.

A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah was one of the team providing Radio 4’s live coverage of the royal wedding; and has since spoken on royal and historical stories from the royal babies to the reburial of Richard III for Sky News, Woman’s Hour, BBC World, Radio 5 Live, and CBC. She has contributed to a number of television documentary series on cinema and fashion, as well as on history and the monarchy. Shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, she is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honorary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.

DEREK MALCOLM

Malcolm was educated at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford. He worked for several decades as a film critic for The Guardian, having previously been an amateur jockey and the paper’s first horse racing correspondent. In 1977, he was a member of the jury at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. In the mid-1980s he was host of The Film Club on BBC2, which was dedicated to art house films, and was director of the London Film Festival for several years.After leaving The Guardian in 2000, he published his final series of articles, The Century of Films, in which he discusses films he admires from his favourite directors from around the world. After The Guardian he became chief film critic for the Evening Standard, before being replaced in 2009 by novelist Andrew O’Hagan. He still contributes film reviews for the newspaper, but it emerged in July 2013 that his contribution to the title was to be reduced further.[5]In 2008 he was a member of the jury at the 30th Moscow International Film Festival.Malcolm is president of the British Federation of Film Societies and the International Film Critics’ Circle. In 2003 he published an autobiographical book, Family Secrets, which recounts how in 1917 his father shot his mother’s lover dead, but was found not guilty of murder.

August 5th

BLUE HAVEN 5:00 – 7:00

TICKETS 15 euros

JOHN BANVILLE

JOHN BANVILLE will be joining us at the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Kinsale, Ireland, August 4 – 11th.

William John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, the youngest of three siblings. He was educated at Christian Brothers schools and St Peter’s College, Wexford. After college John worked as a clerk for Ireland’s national airline, Aer Lingus, before joining The Irish Press as a sub-editor in 1969. Continuing with journalism for over thirty years, John was Literary Editor at The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999.

John’s first book, Long Lankin, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, came out in 1971, followed byBirchwood (1973), Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter(1982), Mefisto (1986), The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), Athena(1995), The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), The Sea (2005),The Infinities (2009) and Ancient Light (2012). His non-fiction book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, was published in 2003 as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Writer and the City’ series. In 2012, an anthology comprising extracts from John’s fifteen novels to date, together with selections drawn from his dramatic works and various reviews, was published under the title, Possessed of a Past: A John Banville Reader.

Among the awards John’s novels have won are the Allied Irish Banks fiction prize, the American-Irish Foundation award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, theGuardian Fiction Prize. In 1989 The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was awarded the first Guinness Peat Aviation Award; in Italian, as La Spiegazione dei Fatti, the book was awarded the 1991 Premio Ennio Flaiano. Ghostswas shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Prize 1993; The Untouchable for the same prize in 1997. In 2003 John was awarded the Premio Nonino. He has also received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation in the US. In 2005, John won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Last year, John was awarded the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature.

Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, John has published the following crime novels: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), The Lemur (2008), Elegy for April (2010), A Death in Summer (2011) and Vengeance (2012). Later this year, Mantle will publish Holy Orders, the sixth book in the Quirke series. The first three have been adapted by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson for the BBC, and will be broadcast later this autumn, starring Gabriel Byrne in the title role.

John (again writing as Benjamin Black) has also been commissioned by theRaymond Chandler Estate to pen a new Philip Marlowe novel which will be published by Holt in the US in 2014.

BILLY O’CALLAGHAN

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and grew up in Douglas village, where he still lives. His first collection of short stories, In Exile, was published by Mercier Press in 2008. This was followed a year later by a second collection, In Too Deep (also published by Mercier Press).[5][6] Then, in 2013, his third collection, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, was published by New Island Books. It earned him a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award.

O’Callaghan’s short stories have been published in: Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Bliza, Confrontation, The Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, the Southeast Review, Southword, Underground Voices, Versal, and Yuan Yang: a Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing, and many other literary journals and magazines around the world. His stories have also been translated into Polish and Turkish, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1’s The Book On One,[9] Sunday Miscellany and the Francis McManus Award series.

O’Callaghan compiled a non-fiction book, Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers, which was published in 2014 by Cork City Libraries as part of their Occasional Series. He also regularly reviews books for the Irish Examiner.

In March 2016, it was announced that O’Callaghan’s first novel, The Dead House, would be released by Brandon Books in Spring 2017.

A novella, A Death In The Family, has been announced as a Ploughshares Solo, forthcoming in 2017.

In November 2013, the title story of O’Callaghan’s most recent collection, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind won the inaugural Short Story of the Year Award at the 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award. In January 2017, he was awarded second place for the Costa Short Story Award 2016 for his story The Boatman.

Listed among his other honours are The Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, the George A. Birmingham Award, and Bursaries for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork County Council. He has also been shortlisted for many other awards both in Ireland and abroad, including the Seán Ó Faoláin Award, the Glimmer Train Prize, the Faulkner-Wisdom Prize and – on four occasions – the RTÉ/P.J. O’Connor Radio Drama Award. In addition, one of his stories was selected, in 2014, as Ireland’s representative in the ongoing UNESCO Cities of Literature project.

“I know of no writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O’Callaghan. The stories in The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind are at once harrowing and uplifting, achingly sad and surpassingly beautiful. O’Callaghan is a treasure of the English language.”

— Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, “The elegant force of Billy O’Callaghan’s prose is immediate and impossible to recover from. He is one of Ireland’s finest short story writers.”

— Simon Van Booy, Frank O’Connor Award-winning author of Love Begins in Winter,Short story collections[edit]In Exile (2008)In Too Deep (2009)The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013)Non-fiction[edit]Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers (2014)

August 6th

PRIM BOOKSTORE

5:00 – 6:00

MICHELE ROBERTS

Michele was born in 1949, twenty minutes after my twin sister Marguerite, to a French mother and an English father. She grew up in Edgware, a suburb of north-west London. She attended two local convent schools. Summer holidays were spent at the house of our French grandparents in Normandy, near Etretat in the Pays de Caux.

Michele read for a B.A. in English Language and Literature at Somerville, Oxford. In those days this was a women’s college: the majority of Oxford colleges did not accept women. Next, she spent two years studying to become a librarian. She knew that she wanted to write but knew, too, how important it was to be able to support herself. She spent a year working for the British Council in South-East Asia. The Vietnam War was devastating the area. She gave up her job and went travelling instead.

After this she gave up any idea of working as a librarian and began earning my living from a variety of part-time jobs. Often she wrote at night. She got involved in a writers’ group, writing short stories, and worked on my first novel, A Piece of the Night, which came out in 1978. It’s always been important her to be financially independent, and she worked as a hospital cleaner, temp secretary, clerk, teacher, journalist, reviewer and critic.

Life as a writer was very hard at first. Still, a chosen poverty is easier to bear than the enforced sort. When Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 and won the W.H.Smith Literary Award in 1993, Michele started making more money, and could finally give up the part-time jobs.

Michele lived in many different places, including Italy and North America, but at the age of forty-four I bought her first home: a small house in France. At the moment she lived in both France and England, moving back and forth between the two, and also spend some time at the University of East Anglia, where she’s currently Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing.

Recently she turned down an O.B.E. because she’s a republican, but she was honoured to be made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Michele a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and The Society of Authors. As well as writing, she serves as a judge for literary prizes, have presented radio arts programmes such as Night Waves, have chaired the British Council’s Literature Advisory Committee, and have travelled abroad extensively with other writers on tours organised by the British Council.

LINDA IBBOTSON

Linda Ibbotson is a poet, artist and photographer from the UK, currently residing in Co. Cork, Ireland. Her poetry has been published internationally including Levure Litteraire, Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Irish Examiner, California Quarterly, Live Encounters, Eastern World , (with her artwork) and Fifty Ways to Fly, also read on radio and performed in France by Irish musician and actor Davog Rynne. Forthcoming- poetry and artwork in Levure Litteraire XIII
Her painting Cascade featured as the cover of a cd and a selection of her paintings and photographs also published in Fekt and a painting in Immagine and Poesia. She writes a poetry and arts blog Contemplating the Muse.
Linda was invited to read at the Abroad Writers Conference in Lismore Castle and in Butlers Townhouse, Dublin.

August 7th

PRIM BOOKSTORE

5:00 – 6:00

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

Born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, Mitchard’s father was a plumber, from Newfoundland, Canada, and her mother a hardware store clerk, a competitive horsewoman, and a member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Cree tribe. She studied creative writing for three semesters under Mark Costello (author of The Murphy Stories) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.She became a newspaper reporter in 1979, eventually achieving a position as lifestyle columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper. Her weekly column, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, appeared in 125 newspapers nationwide until she retired it in 2007. Mitchard is a contributing editor for More (magazine) and is featured regularly in Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, Hallmark, Real Simple and other publications. Her nonfiction work includes the 1986 memoir ‘Mother Less Child’ (WW Norton) and essays in more than 30 anthologies.Mitchard married Dan Allegretti, a reporter for The Capital Times, and the couple had three children (Robert, Daniel, and Martin). Dan also had a daughter, Jocelyn, from a previous marriage. After 13 years of marriage, Allegretti died of cancer at the age of 45 in 1993.After the death of Allegretti, while working freelance for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a part-time public relations position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she started writing her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean.[5] The idea for the story had come to her in a dream in the summer of 1993.[6] She is an alum and distinguished fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, an artist’s colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she went to write the first two chapters on the encouragement of author Jane Hamilton.[5] After finishing the first six chapters, 70 pages, she received a contract with Viking Press in December 1994, for that book and a second one to be written later (The Most Wanted).Bolstered by being featured by Oprah, the novel sold close to 3 million copies by May 1998. It has been Mitchard’s only #1 New York Times Bestseller, on the list for 29 weeks, including 13 weeks at number 1. The book had originally reached number 14, but after being selected by Winfrey, sales jumped. The paperback would spend 16 weeks on the list. The film rights were sold to Mandalay Entertainment, and the story later became a feature film starring Michelle Pfeiffer.But all of her other novels have been bestsellers as well as garnering critical acclaim—particularly for The Most Wanted, Cage of Stars and The Breakdown Lane. The Most Wanted was nominated for Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction and Cage of Stars for Britain’s Spread The Word Prize.In 2004 Mitchard published her first book for children and young adults. Her first children’s picture book, Baby Bat’s Lullaby, appeared in 2004 from HarperChildren’s. Her two middle-grade novels, also published by HarperChildren’s, Starring Prima!: The Mouse of the Ballet Jolie, and Rosalie, My Rosalie: The Tale of a Duckling appeared in 2004 and 2005. Her second children’s picture book, Ready, Set , School!, appeared in 2007.Now You See Her, Mitchard’s first Young Adult novel, was published in 2007 by HarperTeen. All We Know of Heaven (HarperTeen) appeared in spring 2008, and the first in a series of Young Adult mysteries, The Midnight Twins (Razorbill/Penguin), based on the bewildering clairvoyant gift of twins Mallory and Meredith Brynn, debuted in summer 2008.

CONNIE MAY FOWLER is an award-winning novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and teacher. Her most recent book, A Million Fragile Bones, is a memoir that details her experience during the Gulf oil spill and explores the close ties between place, spirituality, family, and environmental devastation. It will be published by Twisted Road Publications in 2017.

Connie is the author of seven other books: six critically praised novels and one memoir. Her novels include How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, The Problem with Murmur Lee, Remembering Blue—recipient of the Chautauqua South Literary Award—and Before Women had Wings—recipient of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Buck Award from the League of American Pen Women. Three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. Connie adapted Before Women had Wings for Oprah Winfrey. The result was an Emmy-winning film starring Ms. Winfrey and Ellen Barkin.

In 2002 she published When Katie Wakes, a memoir that explores her descent and escape from an abusive relationship.

Her work has been translated into 18 languages and is published worldwide. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, London Times, International Herald Tribune, Japan Times, Oxford American, BestLife, and elsewhere. For two years she wrote “Savoring Florida,” a culinary and culture column for FORUM, a publication of the Florida Humanities Council.

In 2007, Connie performed in New York City at The Player’s Club with actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Penny Fuller, and others in an adaptation based on The Other Woman, an anthology that contains her essay “The Uterine Blues.” In 2003, Connie performed in The Vagina Monologues alongside Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez in a production that raised over $100,000 for charity.

Domestic violence shelters and family violence organizations have honored her with numerous awards. Throughout the 1990s she directed the Connie May Fowler Women with Wings Foundation, an organization that was dedicated to aiding women and children in need. In 2009, she received the first annual Peace, Love, and Understanding Award from WMNF Community Radio.

She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low residency creative writing MFA program and directs the College’s VCFA Novel Retreat held each May in Montpelier, Vermont. Connie, along with her husband Bill Hinson, is founder and director of the newly minted Yucatan Writing Conference. For ten years, she directed various writing conferences in Florida, including the prestigious St. Augustine Writers Conference, which she recently closed in order to concentrate her efforts in the Yucatan. She and Bill reside in Cozumel, Florida, and Vermont with their two dogs, Ulysses and Pablo Neruda, and Catalina The Cat.

“We think our palette is words and paper, but it’s not. It’s the sensations and memories that reside in the dark vaults of our hearts.”~~Connie May Fowler

Deborah Henry is the author of the critically acclaimed debut, The Whipping Club, which appeared on Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2012 list, was praised by Publishers Weekly and selected for Oprah’s Summer Reading List.. She holds an MFA from Fairfield University. Her first short story was published in the Copperfield Review, was a historical fiction finalist for Solander Magazine, and was long listed in the Fish Short Story Prize. She has been an expert guest on radio programs as well as on NBC, FOX and CBS television in top markets nationally. An active member of The Academy of American Poets, a patron of the Irish Arts Center in New York, she recently founded the Deborah Henry Scholarship Fund for the Abroad Writers Conference in Dublin. She has traveled extensively in Ireland, and divides her time between New York and New England. She is currently working on a book to film project as well as completing her second novel.

ELLE MORGAN

Elle Morgan, is an adjunct faculty instructor at Pennsylvania State University. She teaches Civic Engagement and Public Speaking. She is also a certified IMMC Yoga instructor.

Elle is the creator and director of The Elements of New Life Scripts, a one of a kind personal development program which focuses on stress reduction through mindfulness, work/home balance, and life purpose as a guiding principle. Using theatre as the medium, people can change their paradigms by changing their life scripts and acting out the stories we tell ourselves and others.

With a background in theatre and public speaking, Elle is unique in the field, bringing a special expressiveness to the arena of self-help. Through her groundbreaking Yoga of Public Speaking video series, she synthesizes ancient wisdom with current theories in neuroscience and positive psychology to provide a program that meets everyone’s need for comfort and joy.

New Life Scripts was developed at Diakon Wilderness Center where Elle served as a counselor for adjudicated youth. She currently provides rehabilitative re-entry programs to prisons. While in Ireland, she will be giving a workshop at Wheatfield Prison, Dublin for 11 incarcerated men.

Her book, The Elements of New Life Scripts–a Retreat Guide is available on Amazon.Information on Destination retreats, retreat-in-a-box, and “You the Movie self discovery party game are all on her website, NewlLifeScripts.com.

August 10th

PRIM BOOKSTORE

5:00 – 6:00

CLARIE KEEGAN

Born in County Wicklow in 1968, she is the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992 and later lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales.Her first collection of short stories was Antarctica (1999). Her second collection of stories, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. September 2010 brought the publication of the ‘long, short story’ “Foster”. American writer Richard Ford, who selected “Foster” as winner of the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, wrote in the winning citation of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality”.

Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Other awards include The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Martin Healy Prize, The Kilkenny Prize and The Tom Gallon Award. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate Scholar. She was a visiting professor at Villanova University in 2008. She is a member of Aosdána.

1999 – Antarctica2007 – Walk the Blue Fields2010 – “Foster”

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We’re so excited about holding our next event in Kinsale, Ireland, August 4th – 11th. This is going to be a true gourmet adventure. Great authors, wonderful food, stimulating discussions in a surrounding of absolute beauty.

In 2014, Kinsale was selected as the Prettiest Small Town in Ireland. Originally a medieval fishing port, historic Kinsale in County Cork, Ireland is one of the most picturesque, popular and historic towns on the south west coast of Ireland. It has been hailed as the Gourmet Capital of Ireland, with no shortage of pubs, cafes, and restaurants. Kinsale is still a fishing village. Located some 25 km (18 m) south of Cork City on the coast near the Old Head of Kinsale, it sits at the mouth of the River Bandon and has a population of more than 2000. Kinsale is a popular holiday resort for Irish and foreign tourists.

When you’re not busy in workshops, there’s so many things to do in Kinsale, on and off the water. From historical walking tours, castles, forts, galleries and shops, arts & crafts, golf and the recently launched Kinsale Gourmet Academy – you’ll never be bored in Kinsale! With three marinas, a yacht club, two outdoor activity centres, boat and yacht hire, harbour cruises, beaches, sailing, kayaking, fishing and scuba diving there is so much to see and do in this busy harbour town.

Participants will be staying at a lovely boutique hotel collection, the Blue Haven, located in the heart of town. It consist of two hotels and three restaurants. The antique Georgian townhouse, the Old Bank House is part of the Blue Haven collection. Every bedroom is uniquely decorated.

Wake-up every morning to a fabulous breakfast buffet plus your choice of a full Irish breakfast, eggs benedict, eggs florentine or a selection of omelettes. All the pastries, scones and breads are freshly made daily in-house.

CONNIE MAY FOWLER – Three time finalist for the Dublin Int. Literary Award

Connie May Fowler is an award-winning novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and teacher. Her most recent book, A Million Fragile Bones, is a memoir that details her experience during the Gulf oil spill and explores the close ties between place, spirituality, family, and environmental devastation. It will be published by Twisted Road Publications in 2017.

Connie is the author of seven other books: six critically praised novels and one memoir. Her novels include How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, The Problem with Murmur Lee, Remembering Blue—recipient of the Chautauqua South Literary Award—and Before Women had Wings—recipient of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Buck Award from the League of American Pen Women. Three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. Connie adapted Before Women had Wings for Oprah Winfrey. The result was an Emmy-winning film starring Ms. Winfrey and Ellen Barkin.

In 2002 she published When Katie Wakes, a memoir that explores her descent and escape from an abusive relationship.

Her work has been translated into 18 languages and is published worldwide. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, London Times, International Herald Tribune, Japan Times, Oxford American, BestLife, and elsewhere. For two years she wrote “Savoring Florida,” a culinary and culture column for FORUM, a publication of the Florida Humanities Council.

In 2007, Connie performed in New York City at The Player’s Club with actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Penny Fuller, and others in an adaptation based on The Other Woman, an anthology that contains her essay “The Uterine Blues.” In 2003, Connie performed in The Vagina Monologues alongside Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez in a production that raised over $100,000 for charity.

Domestic violence shelters and family violence organizations have honored her with numerous awards. Throughout the 1990s she directed the Connie May Fowler Women with Wings Foundation, an organization that was dedicated to aiding women and children in need. In 2009, she received the first annual Peace, Love, and Understanding Award from WMNF Community Radio.

She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low residency creative writing MFA program and directs the College’s VCFA Novel Retreat held each May in Montpelier, Vermont. Connie, along with her husband Bill Hinson, is founder and director of the newly minted Yucatan Writing Conference. For ten years, she directed various writing conferences in Florida, including the prestigious St. Augustine Writers Conference, which she recently closed in order to concentrate her efforts in the Yucatan. She and Bill reside in Cozumel, Florida, and Vermont with their two dogs, Ulysses and Pablo Neruda, and Catalina The Cat.

SARAH GRISTWOOD – Historical Fiction & Non fiction

After leaving Oxford, Sarah Gristwood began work as a journalist, writing at first about the theatre as well as general features on everything from gun control to Giorgio Armani. But increasingly she found herself specialising in film interviews – Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro; Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney. She has appeared in most of the UK’s leading newspapers – The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) – and magazines from Sight and Sound to The New Statesman.

Turning to history she wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Bird of Paradise: The colourful career of the first Mrs Robinson which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. She also published a book on iconic dresses, Fabulous Frocks (with Jane Eastoe); and a 50th anniversary companion to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as well as co-authoring The Ring and the Crown, a book on the history of royal weddings. Her most recent non-fiction books are Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe (2016) Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (2012) and The Story of Beatrix Potter (2016). She has also published a historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror.

A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah was one of the team providing Radio 4’s live coverage of the royal wedding; and has since spoken on royal and historical stories from the royal babies to the reburial of Richard III for Sky News, Woman’s Hour, BBC World, Radio 5 Live, and CBC. She has contributed to a number of television documentary series on cinema and fashion, as well as on history and the monarchy. Shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, she is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honorary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.

DEBORAH HENRY – Connecting With Your Readers

Deborah Henry attended American College in Paris and graduated cum laude from Boston University with a minor in French language and literature. She received her MFA at Fairfield University. She is an active member of The Academy of American Poets, a Board member of Cavankerry Press and a patron of the Irish Arts Center in New York.

Curious about the duality of her own Jewish/Irish heritage, Henry was inspired to examine the territory of interfaith marriage and in so doing was led to the subject of the Irish Industrial School system. She has traveled to Ireland where she has done extensive research and interviews, including those with Mary Raftery (States of Fear documentary filmmaker and co-author of Suffer the Little Children) and Mike Milotte (award-winning journalist), as well as first-hand reports from the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother Baby Homes, Orphanages and the Industrial Schools.

Her first short story was published by The Copperfield Review, was a historical fiction finalist for Solander Magazine of The Historical Novel Society and was longlisted in the 2009/10 Fish Short Story Prize.

THE WHIPPING CLUB is her first novel. She is currently at work on her next book.

CLAIRE KEEGAN (born 1968) is an Irish short stories writer. She was born in County Wicklow in 1968, the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992 and lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales. Her first collection of short stories was Antarctica (1999). Her second collection of stories is Walk the Blue Fields (2007). Her latest publication is Foster which at over 120 pages she describes as a long short story and which we will be launching at the festival. She has won the William Trevor Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Other awards include The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Martin Healy Prize, The Kilkenny Prize and The Tom Gallon Award. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate Scholar. The American writer Richard Ford, who selected her short story Foster as winner of the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, wrote in the winning citation of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality”.

DEREK MALCOLM born in 1932 and was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, having been sent to various boarding schools from the age of four. On leaving university, where he studied history, he attempted to get into publishing but couldn’t get a job and instead became an amateur steeplechase rider, winning 13 races over three seasons before trying a professional acting career in the theatre. Later, he became a journalist, being engaged as a show biz correspondent by the Daily Sketch. From there he went to Cheltenham and worked for the Gloucestershire Echo as general reporter and theatre critic.

In the late fifties, he went to The Guardian in Manchester as an arts page sub-editor under Brian Redhead. A few years later, he moved to The Guardian in London, again as arts sub-editor and was eventually made deputy drama critic to Philip Hope-Wallace, then deputy film critic to Richard Roud. When The Guardian started horse racing, he became the first racing correspondent of the paper until appointed film critic in the early sixties. He remained film critic for over 25 years until his enforced retirement at 65.

A few years later he succeeded Alexander Walker as film critic of the Evening Standard. Earlier this year, he left regular reviewing to become the Standard‘s critic at film festivals. During his time at The Guardian, he won the IPC Critic of the Year title, directed the London Film Festival, became a Governor of the BFI, President of the International Association of Film Critics (Fipresci) and President of the British Federation of Film Societies. He has also served on juries at the three main European Festivals in Berlin, Cannes and Venice, as well as at the Moscow, Istanbul, Goa, Singapore, Chicago, Dinard and Rio Festivals.

He has written three books — Robert Mitchum, 100 Years of Cinema and Family Secrets. The last was a personal memory of his father’s marriage to his mother and the famous case during the First World War during which his father was accused at the Old Bailey of shooting his wife’s lover. In 2001 he was named by an American film trade paper as one of the six most influential film critics in the world.

Outside the world of film, he has been a keen cricketer, tennis and squash player, and was Captain of The Guardian cricket team for some years, touring India, Sri Lanka and California with the team.

JACQUELINE MITCHARD will be returning. She’ll be teaching her extremely successful workshop, FULL MANUSCRIPT EDIT & CRITIQUE. This workshop fills-up rapidly since she only accepts 6 participants.

Jacqueline is a New York Times Bestselling Author, was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, winner, The Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Aware, nominated two times for Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, Anne Powers Award for Fiction, New York Times notable books, Banks Street Notable Books, Bluebonnet Prize

Jacqueline has published 13 Bestselling novels, 7 Young Adult books, 4 Children Books and numerous articles in journals in newspapers.

MICHELE ROBERTS, BOOKER FINALIST – Fiction

Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud- stories of sex and love (2010). Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

DAILY SCHEDULE

AUGUST 4TH

Arrival

Morning workshops will begin at 8:00 – 12:00

Secret Garden at Blue Haven, Connie May Fowler

Beach House, Gazebo — Sarah Gristwood/Historical Fiction & Non-Fiction–I will be picking up Sarah’s participants at 7:50 am. Please be on time. Otherwise, you’ll have to take a taxi.

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Secret Garden at Blue Haven, Michele Roberts

5:00 – 7:00

Readings at Prim’s Bookstore in Kinsale

Welcome Dinner Party at LEMON LEAF in Kinsale

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AUGUST 5TH

Breakfast 7:30 – 10:30

Morning Workshops 8:00 – 12:00

Secret Garden at Blue Haven, Connie May Fowler

Beach House, Gazebo — Sarah Gristwood/Historical Fiction & Non-Fiction–I will be picking up Sarah’s participants at 7:50 am. Please be on time. Otherwise, you’ll have to take a taxi.

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Secret Garden at Blue Haven, Michele Roberts

5:00 – 6:00

Readings at Prim’s Bookstore in Kinsale

Dinner at Beach House

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AUGUST 6TH

Breakfast 7:30 – 10:30

Morning Workshops 8:00 – 12:00

Secret Garden at Blue Haven, Connie May Fowler

Beach House, Gazebo, Deb Henry–I will be picking up Deb’s participants at 7:50 am. Please be on time. Otherwise, you’ll have to take a taxi.

$3,600 Single – you’re welcome to bring a companion for a fee of $300 – includes full breakfast, 5 dinners, workshops and readings

Price without hotel room

$1,500 – only includes workshops and readings

$350 –5 Dinners with Wine

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

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SARAH GRISTWOOD – HISTORICAL NON-FICTION & FICTION

This workshop is about, exploring the ground between historical fact and historical fiction, is led by Sarah Gristwood who has worked widely in both fields. For many years a film journalist (working for the ‘Guardian’ and ‘The Times’ among others), she is now a bestselling Tudor and royal historian, with half a dozen biographies and two historical novels to her name.

The workshop, at once practical and theoretical, will explore questions such as:– the use of historical research in historical fiction– the way fiction bleeds into historical fact– new forms in historical narrative– the creation of a saleable narrative from the messy world of history.’

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DEBORAH HENRY – Connecting With Your Readers

We will discuss in three part sections the myriad ways we can find our niche and connect with our readers in the digital age.

Part One: Four to Six months before publication date.

Part Two: Before and After Launch Date.

Part Three: After initial launch and onward – How to build a wider audience.

Throughout the three segments, we will have Q & A which will be organic to the flow of discussion as we share the journey — including utilizing traditional and social media skills to land an agent, an editor, a publisher, blurbs and much more as well as how to build a global writing community with ever increasing innovative marketing models.

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CLAIRE KEEGAN – 3,000 WORD MANUSCRIPT OR SHORT-STORY EDIT

Claire Keegan, internationally acclaimed author and teacher of creative writing, will run a three day fiction workshop. This three day workshop will concentrate on works-in-progress submitted by the participants.

Keegan will spend between 3-5 hours on each text before the workshop begins, and will then examine and discuss every text with the group during the weekend.

Discussion will concentrate on structure of a narrative, paragraph structure, time, tension, drama, melodrama, statement,description, suggestion, conflict, character, humour, point of view, place, time and setting.

The aim, always, is to help each author with the next draft. The workshop will be of particular interest to those who write, teach, read or edit fiction — but anyone with an interest in how fiction works,improving their prose and/or helping others to do so, is welcome to attend. While most participants like to submit a manuscript, this is not a requirement.

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JACQUELYN MITCHARD -Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

LIMITED to six students, #1 New York Times Bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard will host a full-manuscript intensive critique. Each student will receive advance digital copies of the other writers’ manuscripts and, at Lismore Castle, Mitchard will lead a full half-day session on each completed book of fiction or creative non-fiction. Admission to this class is based on individual manuscript potential, and application must be made well in advance of the conference in order to assure that the extra demands of a full-book seminar can be met. Mitchard also will provide a written critique with editing and revision suggestions to each participant. Contact conference organizer Nancy Gerbault for guidelines and specifics.

This is an intensive workshop. Plan on only taking this workshop along with a second workshop at the end of the week.

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MICHELE ROBERTS – Fiction

One of the pieces of advice I offer in the morning workshop to students tackling writer’s block is to have something delicious to eat. Another tip is to practise automatic writing. Given a phrase, you then write non-stop for three minutes, whatever comes up, without censoring. A good way to get the juices flowing is to begin with “I hate” or “I am disgusted by . . .” Hate and disgust are helpful energies and provoke original writing.”

None of us gets nostalgic about school dinners, do we? From primary school, I remember fatty mutton in greasy gravy. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, semolina pudding, macaroni in warmish sweetened milk. Slimy and disgusting. At secondary school, a convent, the nuns’ speciality was carrots boiled to a pulp, tasting of soap. Slimy. Or spinach, bitter and sour and, yes, slimy. Too close in texture and appearance to spit and sick, to all those bodily wastes we shun, which the feminist author Julia Kristeva calls “the abject”. Giving an abstract name to wanting to throw up helps keep it at bay. Kristeva refers somewhere to “those currents of bodily feeling we call emotion”. In the writing workshop, we begin by translating abstract words like bliss and desire and contentment into sensual, physical images.

READING SCHEDULE

August 4th

PRIM BOOKSTORE

5:00 – 7:00

SARAH GRISTWOOD

After leaving Oxford, Sarah Gristwood began work as a journalist, writing at first about the theatre as well as general features on everything from gun control to Giorgio Armani. But increasingly she found herself specialising in film interviews – Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro; Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney. She has appeared in most of the UK’s leading newspapers – The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) – and magazines from Sight and Sound to The New Statesman.

Turning to history she wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Bird of Paradise: The colourful career of the first Mrs Robinson which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. She also published a book on iconic dresses, Fabulous Frocks (with Jane Eastoe); and a 50th anniversary companion to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as well as co-authoring The Ring and the Crown, a book on the history of royal weddings. Her most recent non-fiction books are Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe (2016) Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (2012) and The Story of Beatrix Potter (2016). She has also published a historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror.

A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah was one of the team providing Radio 4’s live coverage of the royal wedding; and has since spoken on royal and historical stories from the royal babies to the reburial of Richard III for Sky News, Woman’s Hour, BBC World, Radio 5 Live, and CBC. She has contributed to a number of television documentary series on cinema and fashion, as well as on history and the monarchy. Shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, she is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honorary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.

DEREK MALCOLM

Malcolm was educated at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford. He worked for several decades as a film critic for The Guardian, having previously been an amateur jockey and the paper’s first horse racing correspondent. In 1977, he was a member of the jury at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. In the mid-1980s he was host of The Film Club on BBC2, which was dedicated to art house films, and was director of the London Film Festival for several years.After leaving The Guardian in 2000, he published his final series of articles, The Century of Films, in which he discusses films he admires from his favourite directors from around the world. After The Guardian he became chief film critic for the Evening Standard, before being replaced in 2009 by novelist Andrew O’Hagan. He still contributes film reviews for the newspaper, but it emerged in July 2013 that his contribution to the title was to be reduced further.[5]In 2008 he was a member of the jury at the 30th Moscow International Film Festival.Malcolm is president of the British Federation of Film Societies and the International Film Critics’ Circle. In 2003 he published an autobiographical book, Family Secrets, which recounts how in 1917 his father shot his mother’s lover dead, but was found not guilty of murder.

August 5th

PRIM BOOKSTORE5:00 – 6:00

BILLY O’CALLAGHAN

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and grew up in Douglas village, where he still lives. His first collection of short stories, In Exile, was published by Mercier Press in 2008. This was followed a year later by a second collection, In Too Deep (also published by Mercier Press).[5][6] Then, in 2013, his third collection, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, was published by New Island Books. It earned him a 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award.

O’Callaghan’s short stories have been published in: Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Bliza, Confrontation, The Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, the Southeast Review, Southword, Underground Voices, Versal, and Yuan Yang: a Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing, and many other literary journals and magazines around the world. His stories have also been translated into Polish and Turkish, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1’s The Book On One,[9] Sunday Miscellany and the Francis McManus Award series.

O’Callaghan compiled a non-fiction book, Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers, which was published in 2014 by Cork City Libraries as part of their Occasional Series. He also regularly reviews books for the Irish Examiner.

In March 2016, it was announced that O’Callaghan’s first novel, The Dead House, would be released by Brandon Books in Spring 2017.

A novella, A Death In The Family, has been announced as a Ploughshares Solo, forthcoming in 2017.

In November 2013, the title story of O’Callaghan’s most recent collection, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind won the inaugural Short Story of the Year Award at the 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award. In January 2017, he was awarded second place for the Costa Short Story Award 2016 for his story The Boatman.

Listed among his other honours are The Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, the George A. Birmingham Award, and Bursaries for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork County Council. He has also been shortlisted for many other awards both in Ireland and abroad, including the Seán Ó Faoláin Award, the Glimmer Train Prize, the Faulkner-Wisdom Prize and – on four occasions – the RTÉ/P.J. O’Connor Radio Drama Award. In addition, one of his stories was selected, in 2014, as Ireland’s representative in the ongoing UNESCO Cities of Literature project.

“I know of no writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O’Callaghan. The stories in The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind are at once harrowing and uplifting, achingly sad and surpassingly beautiful. O’Callaghan is a treasure of the English language.”

— Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, “The elegant force of Billy O’Callaghan’s prose is immediate and impossible to recover from. He is one of Ireland’s finest short story writers.”

— Simon Van Booy, Frank O’Connor Award-winning author of Love Begins in Winter,Short story collections[edit]In Exile (2008)In Too Deep (2009)The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (2013)Non-fiction[edit]Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers (2014)

August 6th

PRIM BOOKSTORE

5:00 – 6:00

MICHELE ROBERTS

Michele was born in 1949, twenty minutes after my twin sister Marguerite, to a French mother and an English father. She grew up in Edgware, a suburb of north-west London. She attended two local convent schools. Summer holidays were spent at the house of our French grandparents in Normandy, near Etretat in the Pays de Caux.

Michele read for a B.A. in English Language and Literature at Somerville, Oxford. In those days this was a women’s college: the majority of Oxford colleges did not accept women. Next, she spent two years studying to become a librarian. She knew that she wanted to write but knew, too, how important it was to be able to support herself. She spent a year working for the British Council in South-East Asia. The Vietnam War was devastating the area. She gave up her job and went travelling instead.

After this she gave up any idea of working as a librarian and began earning my living from a variety of part-time jobs. Often she wrote at night. She got involved in a writers’ group, writing short stories, and worked on my first novel, A Piece of the Night, which came out in 1978. It’s always been important her to be financially independent, and she worked as a hospital cleaner, temp secretary, clerk, teacher, journalist, reviewer and critic.

Life as a writer was very hard at first. Still, a chosen poverty is easier to bear than the enforced sort. When Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 and won the W.H.Smith Literary Award in 1993, Michele started making more money, and could finally give up the part-time jobs.

Michele lived in many different places, including Italy and North America, but at the age of forty-four I bought her first home: a small house in France. At the moment she lived in both France and England, moving back and forth between the two, and also spend some time at the University of East Anglia, where she’s currently Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing.

Recently she turned down an O.B.E. because she’s a republican, but she was honoured to be made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Michele a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and The Society of Authors. As well as writing, she serves as a judge for literary prizes, have presented radio arts programmes such as Night Waves, have chaired the British Council’s Literature Advisory Committee, and have travelled abroad extensively with other writers on tours organised by the British Council.

Born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, Mitchard’s father was a plumber, from Newfoundland, Canada, and her mother a hardware store clerk, a competitive horsewoman, and a member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Cree tribe. She studied creative writing for three semesters under Mark Costello (author of The Murphy Stories) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.She became a newspaper reporter in 1979, eventually achieving a position as lifestyle columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper. Her weekly column, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, appeared in 125 newspapers nationwide until she retired it in 2007. Mitchard is a contributing editor for More (magazine) and is featured regularly in Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, Hallmark, Real Simple and other publications. Her nonfiction work includes the 1986 memoir ‘Mother Less Child’ (WW Norton) and essays in more than 30 anthologies.Mitchard married Dan Allegretti, a reporter for The Capital Times, and the couple had three children (Robert, Daniel, and Martin). Dan also had a daughter, Jocelyn, from a previous marriage. After 13 years of marriage, Allegretti died of cancer at the age of 45 in 1993.After the death of Allegretti, while working freelance for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a part-time public relations position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she started writing her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean.[5] The idea for the story had come to her in a dream in the summer of 1993.[6] She is an alum and distinguished fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, an artist’s colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she went to write the first two chapters on the encouragement of author Jane Hamilton.[5] After finishing the first six chapters, 70 pages, she received a contract with Viking Press in December 1994, for that book and a second one to be written later (The Most Wanted).Bolstered by being featured by Oprah, the novel sold close to 3 million copies by May 1998. It has been Mitchard’s only #1 New York Times Bestseller, on the list for 29 weeks, including 13 weeks at number 1. The book had originally reached number 14, but after being selected by Winfrey, sales jumped. The paperback would spend 16 weeks on the list. The film rights were sold to Mandalay Entertainment, and the story later became a feature film starring Michelle Pfeiffer.But all of her other novels have been bestsellers as well as garnering critical acclaim—particularly for The Most Wanted, Cage of Stars and The Breakdown Lane. The Most Wanted was nominated for Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction and Cage of Stars for Britain’s Spread The Word Prize.In 2004 Mitchard published her first book for children and young adults. Her first children’s picture book, Baby Bat’s Lullaby, appeared in 2004 from HarperChildren’s. Her two middle-grade novels, also published by HarperChildren’s, Starring Prima!: The Mouse of the Ballet Jolie, and Rosalie, My Rosalie: The Tale of a Duckling appeared in 2004 and 2005. Her second children’s picture book, Ready, Set , School!, appeared in 2007.Now You See Her, Mitchard’s first Young Adult novel, was published in 2007 by HarperTeen. All We Know of Heaven (HarperTeen) appeared in spring 2008, and the first in a series of Young Adult mysteries, The Midnight Twins (Razorbill/Penguin), based on the bewildering clairvoyant gift of twins Mallory and Meredith Brynn, debuted in summer 2008.

CONNIE MAY FOWLER is an award-winning novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and teacher. Her most recent book, A Million Fragile Bones, is a memoir that details her experience during the Gulf oil spill and explores the close ties between place, spirituality, family, and environmental devastation. It will be published by Twisted Road Publications in 2017.

Connie is the author of seven other books: six critically praised novels and one memoir. Her novels include How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, The Problem with Murmur Lee, Remembering Blue—recipient of the Chautauqua South Literary Award—and Before Women had Wings—recipient of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Buck Award from the League of American Pen Women. Three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. Connie adapted Before Women had Wings for Oprah Winfrey. The result was an Emmy-winning film starring Ms. Winfrey and Ellen Barkin.

In 2002 she published When Katie Wakes, a memoir that explores her descent and escape from an abusive relationship.

Her work has been translated into 18 languages and is published worldwide. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, London Times, International Herald Tribune, Japan Times, Oxford American, BestLife, and elsewhere. For two years she wrote “Savoring Florida,” a culinary and culture column for FORUM, a publication of the Florida Humanities Council.

In 2007, Connie performed in New York City at The Player’s Club with actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Penny Fuller, and others in an adaptation based on The Other Woman, an anthology that contains her essay “The Uterine Blues.” In 2003, Connie performed in The Vagina Monologues alongside Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez in a production that raised over $100,000 for charity.

Domestic violence shelters and family violence organizations have honored her with numerous awards. Throughout the 1990s she directed the Connie May Fowler Women with Wings Foundation, an organization that was dedicated to aiding women and children in need. In 2009, she received the first annual Peace, Love, and Understanding Award from WMNF Community Radio.

She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low residency creative writing MFA program and directs the College’s VCFA Novel Retreat held each May in Montpelier, Vermont. Connie, along with her husband Bill Hinson, is founder and director of the newly minted Yucatan Writing Conference. For ten years, she directed various writing conferences in Florida, including the prestigious St. Augustine Writers Conference, which she recently closed in order to concentrate her efforts in the Yucatan. She and Bill reside in Cozumel, Florida, and Vermont with their two dogs, Ulysses and Pablo Neruda, and Catalina The Cat.

“We think our palette is words and paper, but it’s not. It’s the sensations and memories that reside in the dark vaults of our hearts.”~~Connie May Fowler

Deborah Henry attended American College in Paris and graduated cum laude from Boston University with a minor in French language and literature. She received her MFA at Fairfield University. She is an active member of The Academy of American Poets, a Board member of Cavankerry Press and a patron of the Irish Arts Center in New York.

Curious about the duality of her own Jewish/Irish heritage, Henry was inspired to examine the territory of interfaith marriage and in so doing was led to the subject of the Irish Industrial School system. She has traveled to Ireland where she has done extensive research and interviews, including those with Mary Raftery (States of Fear documentary filmmaker and co-author of Suffer the Little Children) and Mike Milotte (award-winning journalist), as well as first-hand reports from the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother Baby Homes, Orphanages and the Industrial Schools.

Her first short story was published by The Copperfield Review, was a historical fiction finalist for Solander Magazine of The Historical Novel Society and was longlisted in the 2009/10 Fish Short Story Prize.

THE WHIPPING CLUB is her first novel. She lives in Fairfield, Connecticut with her husband and their three children. She is currently at work on her next book.

August 10th

PRIM BOOKSTORE

5:00 – 6:00

CLARIE KEEGAN

Born in County Wicklow in 1968, she is the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. She travelled to New Orleans, Louisiana when she was seventeen and studied English and Political Science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992 and later lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales.Her first collection of short stories was Antarctica (1999). Her second collection of stories, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. September 2010 brought the publication of the ‘long, short story’ “Foster”. American writer Richard Ford, who selected “Foster” as winner of the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, wrote in the winning citation of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality”.

Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Other awards include The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Martin Healy Prize, The Kilkenny Prize and The Tom Gallon Award. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate Scholar. She was a visiting professor at Villanova University in 2008. She is a member of Aosdána.

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Connie May Fowler will be joining us in Kinsale, Ireland. Connie will be teaching a Full Manuscript Edit & Critique Workshop.

Connie May Fowler is an award-winning novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and teacher. Her most recent book, A Million Fragile Bones, is a memoir that details her experience during the Gulf oil spill and explores the close ties between place, spirituality, family, and environmental devastation. It will be published by Twisted Road Publications in 2017.

Connie is the author of seven other books: six critically praised novels and one memoir. Her novels include How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, Sugar Cage, River of Hidden Dreams, The Problem with Murmur Lee, Remembering Blue—recipient of the Chautauqua South Literary Award—and Before Women had Wings—recipient of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Buck Award from the League of American Pen Women. Three of her novels have been Dublin International Literary Award nominees. Connie adapted Before Women had Wings for Oprah Winfrey. The result was an Emmy-winning film starring Ms. Winfrey and Ellen Barkin.

In 2002 she published When Katie Wakes, a memoir that explores her descent and escape from an abusive relationship.

Her work has been translated into 18 languages and is published worldwide. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, London Times, International Herald Tribune, Japan Times, Oxford American, BestLife, and elsewhere. For two years she wrote “Savoring Florida,” a culinary and culture column for FORUM, a publication of the Florida Humanities Council.

In 2007, Connie performed in New York City at The Player’s Club with actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Penny Fuller, and others in an adaptation based on The Other Woman, an anthology that contains her essay “The Uterine Blues.” In 2003, Connie performed in The Vagina Monologues alongside Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez in a production that raised over $100,000 for charity.

Domestic violence shelters and family violence organizations have honored her with numerous awards. Throughout the 1990s she directed the Connie May Fowler Women with Wings Foundation, an organization that was dedicated to aiding women and children in need. In 2009, she received the first annual Peace, Love, and Understanding Award from WMNF Community Radio.

She teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low residency creative writing MFA program and directs the College’s VCFA Novel Retreat held each May in Montpelier, Vermont. Connie, along with her husband Bill Hinson, is founder and director of the newly minted Yucatan Writing Conference. For ten years, she directed various writing conferences in Florida, including the prestigious St. Augustine Writers Conference, which she recently closed in order to concentrate her efforts in the Yucatan. She and Bill reside in Cozumel, Florida, and Vermont with their two dogs, Ulysses and Pablo Neruda, and Catalina The Cat.

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It’s official, we have a date, August 4th – 11th. We’re going to Kinsale, Ireland.

In 2014, Kinsale was selected as the Prettiest Small Town in Ireland. Originally a medieval fishing port, historic Kinsale in County Cork, Ireland is one of the most picturesque, popular and historic towns on the south west coast of Ireland. It has been hailed as the Gourmet Capital of Ireland, with no shortage of pubs, cafes, and restaurants. Kinsale is still a fishing village. Located some 25 km (18 m) south of Cork City on the coast near the Old Head of Kinsale, it sits at the mouth of the River Bandon and has a population of more than 2000. Kinsale is a popular holiday resort for Irish and foreign tourists.

We’ll be staying at that the Lovely Georgian hotel, Old Bank House. It’s situated in the center of the town.

Singles: $3,500 If you’re interested in bringing a non-participating companion it will be $300 extra. includes hotel, buffet breakfast, 5 dinners, workshops and readings. Plus, a harbor boat cruise

I’m still waiting to hear back from several authors. We will have 3 poetry workshops, 2 Fiction/non-fictiion workshops, Historical fiction & nonfiction, Memoir workshop, Travel workshop and more.

AUTHORS

SARAH GRISTWOOD – Historical Fiction & Non fiction

After leaving Oxford, Sarah Gristwood began work as a journalist, writing at first about the theatre as well as general features on everything from gun control to Giorgio Armani. But increasingly she found herself specialising in film interviews – Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro; Martin Scorsese and Paul McCartney. She has appeared in most of the UK’s leading newspapers – The Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph (Daily and Sunday) – and magazines from Sight and Sound to The New Statesman.

Turning to history she wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Bird of Paradise: The colourful career of the first Mrs Robinson which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week. She also published a book on iconic dresses, Fabulous Frocks (with Jane Eastoe); and a 50th anniversary companion to the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, as well as co-authoring The Ring and the Crown, a book on the history of royal weddings. Her most recent non-fiction books are Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe (2016) Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (2012) and The Story of Beatrix Potter (2016). She has also published a historical novel, The Girl in the Mirror.

A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah was one of the team providing Radio 4’s live coverage of the royal wedding; and has since spoken on royal and historical stories from the royal babies to the reburial of Richard III for Sky News, Woman’s Hour, BBC World, Radio 5 Live, and CBC. She has contributed to a number of television documentary series on cinema and fashion, as well as on history and the monarchy. Shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, she is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honorary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.

DEBORAH HENRY – Connecting With Your Readers

Deborah Henry attended American College in Paris and graduated cum laude from Boston University with a minor in French language and literature. She received her MFA at Fairfield University. She is an active member of The Academy of American Poets, a Board member of Cavankerry Press and a patron of the Irish Arts Center in New York.

Curious about the duality of her own Jewish/Irish heritage, Henry was inspired to examine the territory of interfaith marriage and in so doing was led to the subject of the Irish Industrial School system. She has traveled to Ireland where she has done extensive research and interviews, including those with Mary Raftery (States of Fear documentary filmmaker and co-author of Suffer the Little Children) and Mike Milotte (award-winning journalist), as well as first-hand reports from the survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, Mother Baby Homes, Orphanages and the Industrial Schools.

Her first short story was published by The Copperfield Review, was a historical fiction finalist for Solander Magazine of The Historical Novel Society and was longlisted in the 2009/10 Fish Short Story Prize.

THE WHIPPING CLUB is her first novel. She is currently at work on her next book.

JACQUELINE MITCHARD will be returning. She’ll be teaching her extremely successful workshop, FULL MANUSCRIPT EDIT & CRITIQUE. This workshop fills-up rapidly since she only accepts 6 participants.

Jacqueline is a New York Times Bestselling Author, was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction, winner, The Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Aware, nominated two times for Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, Anne Powers Award for Fiction, New York Times notable books, Banks Street Notable Books, Bluebonnet Prize

Jacqueline has published 13 Bestselling novels, 7 Young Adult books, 4 Children Books and numerous articles in journals in newspapers.

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH – Fiction

Novakovich is a recipient of the Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, panelist of National Endowment of the Arts, an award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Novakovich was a finalist for The Man Booker International Prize in 2013. He was anthologized in Best American Poetry, Pushcart Prize (three times), and O.Henry Prize Stories. Kirkus Reviews called Novakovich “the best American short stories writer of the decade”.

JACOB POLLEY, 2016 T.S. ELIOT PRIZE WINNER – POETRY

Jacob is an English poet from Carlisle, Cumbria, United Kingdom.

His first four books of poems, all published by Picador, are The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006), The Havocs (2012), and Jackself (2016). Jackself won the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize.

He graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in 1997.

Polley won an Eric Gregory Award, and the BBC Radio 4/Arts Council ‘First Verse’ Award, in 2002. His first book, The Brink (Picador 2003), was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and went on to be shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys prize.

Polley was selected as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004.

His second book, Little Gods (Picador 2006), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Jacob Polley’s first novel, Talk of the Town, was published in June 2009 by Picador. The book went on to win the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and was also shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.

The Havocs (2012), his third book of poetry, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the 2012 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2012.

MICHELE ROBERTS, BOOKER FINALIST – Fiction

Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her memoir Paper Houses was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in June 2007. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud- stories of sex and love (2010). Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

DECLAN RYAN – POETRY

Declan Ryan was born in County Mayo, Ireland. He’s published four pamphlets with Faber and Faber. Declan was included in Faber’s New Poets series. He is poetry editor at Ambit and teaches at King’s College London. He was highly recommended by poet Ruth Patel, one of our instructors. Ruth judges the T. S. Eliot Prize.

GABRIELLE SELZ – Memoir & Biography

Gabrielle Selz is a writer and a live storyteller. Combining her dual passions for words and images, she holds a BA in art history from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in writing from City College of New York. She has worked in commercial television and on the political campaigns of two Greek democratic presidential candidates: Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. She is the recipient of a fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Moth Story Slam winner. She has published in magazines and newspapers including, The New Yorker, The New York Times, More magazine, Los Angeles Times, Fiction, Newsday, and Art Papers. She now writes art reviews for The Huffington Post, and you can read her blog about art and life here.

Unstill Life is her first book. She is currently writing a biography on the American painter, Sam Francis.

DELTA WILLIS – Travel Writing

Delta has published more than 30 articles in Audubon, Outside, Natural History, PEOPLE,The New York Times Book Review,( SOME PRIMATES WEREN’T TO BE TRUSTED – New York Times ) The Explorer’s Journal, Diversion and Omni’s Exploration column. For two decades she was chief contributor to Fodor’s Guide to Kenya & Tanzania. See her reports from Kenya

A member of the Explorers Club, Willis crossed the Sahara for a London Zoological Society/World Wildlife Fund expedition which led to the establishment the largest nature reserve in Africa. When China first opened to American travelers, Lindblad Travel recruited her to guide their clients for 30 day tours. She organized the first expedition to East Africa for the late Stephen Jay Gould. En route to Nairobi, the evolutionary biologist served as her guide to the home of Charles Darwin, now a museum, near London.

Interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Pulse of the Planet,” and “New York & Company,” Willis has lectured at The American Museum of Natural History, New York University, The Explorers Club, The 92nd Street Y, and the Fulbright Institute.

Her memoirs, “My Boat in the City,” begun when her base camp was a houseboat moored on the edge of Manhattan.

Finishing Line Press Authors will also be joining us.

Addition list of authors teaching workshops will follow shortly.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

DEBORAH HENRY –Connecting With Your Readers

We will discuss in three part sections the myriad ways we can find our niche and connect with our readers in the digital age.

Part One: Four to Six months before publication date.

Part Two: Before and After Launch Date.

Part Three: After initial launch and onward – How to build a wider audience.

Throughout the three segments, we will have Q & A which will be organic to the flow of discussion as we share the journey — including utilizing traditional and social media skills to land an agent, an editor, a publisher, blurbs and much more as well as how to build a global writing community with ever increasing innovative marketing models.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD -Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

LIMITED to six students, #1 New York Times Bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard will host a full-manuscript intensive critique. Each student will receive advance digital copies of the other writers’ manuscripts and, at Lismore Castle, Mitchard will lead a full half-day session on each completed book of fiction or creative non-fiction. Admission to this class is based on individual manuscript potential, and application must be made well in advance of the conference in order to assure that the extra demands of a full-book seminar can be met. Mitchard also will provide a written critique with editing and revision suggestions to each participant. Contact conference organizer Nancy Gerbault for guidelines and specifics.

This is an intensive workshop. Plan on only taking this workshop along with a second workshop at the end of the week.

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH – Fiction/Nonfiction

The Art of the Microforms

A Multi-genre course, concentrating on the short forms, from a short paragraph to vignettes up to approximately 1500 words. The boundaries between narrative poems, lyrical essay, and flash fiction are frequently arbitrary, so let’s not worry about the definition of what we do in the short form, and play. The definition can come later.

Course Objective: To play with words in order to come up with good moments.

Come to class with several short pieces for us to give you constructive feedback now how to revise and improve.

The class time will be divided among the following activities:

Critiquing your work constructively.Analyzing published paradigms of short form writing.Sketching and writing vignettes from prompts and assignments.Even in the short form, the elements of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction can be at play productively, so we will concentrate on plotting stories from the basic motives. Man is his desire, sid Aristoteles. We’ll sketch several stories based on primary motives, desire and fear.

Paradigms of microforms to be discussed and covered:

Examples of quick writingGrace Paley, Robert Coover

2. Myths, Parables

Story of Jonah, Prodigal Son. Tolstoy’s, Three Parables. Johann Peter Hebe, Man is a Strange Creature.

3. Fables and Fairy Tales

Aesop, Brothers Grimm

4. Short-Shorts

Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Hemingway

5. Flash Fiction

Lydia Davis, Jonathan Wilson, Diane Williams, Dave Eggers

6. Absurdist and Surrealist Stories

Etgar Keret, Daniil Kharms, Dino Buzzati, Aimee Bender

7. The Lyrical Essay

Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf

8. Very Short Essay, True Story

Mikhail Iossel, Why…, JN, “Ice”

9 Story as one scene:

The Use of Force by William Carlos William. http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html

One of the pieces of advice I offer in the morning workshop to students tackling writer’s block is to have something delicious to eat. Another tip is to practise automatic writing. Given a phrase, you then write non-stop for three minutes, whatever comes up, without censoring. A good way to get the juices flowing is to begin with “I hate” or “I am disgusted by . . .” Hate and disgust are helpful energies and provoke original writing.”

None of us gets nostalgic about school dinners, do we? From primary school, I remember fatty mutton in greasy gravy. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, semolina pudding, macaroni in warmish sweetened milk. Slimy and disgusting. At secondary school, a convent, the nuns’ speciality was carrots boiled to a pulp, tasting of soap. Slimy. Or spinach, bitter and sour and, yes, slimy. Too close in texture and appearance to spit and sick, to all those bodily wastes we shun, which the feminist author Julia Kristeva calls “the abject”. Giving an abstract name to wanting to throw up helps keep it at bay. Kristeva refers somewhere to “those currents of bodily feeling we call emotion”. In the writing workshop, we begin by translating abstract words like bliss and desire and contentment into sensual, physical images.

GABRIELLE SELZ – 3 Day Memoir Intensive and Biography workshop

The American essayist and poet, Kenneth Rexroth wrote, “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act.” Memoir is a creative act, one that marks the intersection of truth and storytelling.

Whether writing personal essay-length pieces or a book, this workshop will show you how to best tell the stories from your life.Together, we will analyze methods for creating a narrative through imaginative reconstruction. Participants will be asked to submit a 2,500-word sample—a stand-alone essay or an excerpt.

After introductions, we will begin with a series of essential questions that will guide us in clarifying and defining our projects. The answers are meant to be flexible, opening us up to an ongoing process that will help illuminate our material and choices as we progress.

Over the course of our three days together, each writer’s work will be work- shopped in a safe, honest environment. The whole group will help the writer identify what is unique and exciting in their work, as well as what might be getting in their way. If you are embarking on something new, it is okay to submit a skeletal description. We will then focus on helping you sketch and fill out your memoir project.

We will emphasize issues of craft with discussions on:

 Prologue: How to hook readers, set up the stakes and foreshadow the arc of the story.

 Structure: How to shape through Conflict and Turning Points.

 Character/Dialogue: Making characters dimensional through desire and contrast.

 Desire Line: Ask yourself, “What did I want more than anything else? What is my underlying question, my underlying want?” Create a desire line. It’s all about wanting.

 Writing the personal outward and within the context of history.

 Setting/Place: Creating setting, mood and emotion of place.

 Emotional authenticity

 Theme and how to weave it in so that it informs all the aspects of the story.

 Revision and its various stages.

 The Business/The Writing LifeDELTA WILLIS – Travel and Food Writing

Travel Images Expand your reach and profits by submitting sharp photos with your travel reports. Increasingly online magazines want a photo essay, spiced with a few paragraphs. Now smart phone images allow you to compete with professional photographers to illustrate your own articles. This workshop will focus on composition, editing, and social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram) that engage your readers. Three workshops will explore photo ops in the village and harbor of Kinsale; two will be indoors with laptop exercises, including capturing color, light, and sense of place with words, photographing food, when to avoid selfies, the dangers of Photoshop, copyright protection, and photographing people without permission. Minor additional expenses for excursions, workshops in cafes or pubs. Led by Delta Willis; see sample blog with images

DAILY SCHEDULE

AUGUST 4TH

Arrival

Morning Workshops begin at 8:00 am – 12:00

Room #1 Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

Room #2 Memoir & Biography Room

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Travel Writing

Room #2 Declan Ryan/Poetry

Readings 5:00 – 7:00

Welcome Dinner Party at LEMON LEAF

AUGUST 5TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Morning Workshops 8:00 – 12:00

Room #1 Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

Room #2 Memoir & Biography

Afternoon Workshops 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Michele Roberts/Fiction

Room #2 Declan Ryan/Poetry

Readings 5:00 – 7:00

Dinner – Free night out

AUGUST 6TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Morning Workshops 8:00 – 12:00

Room #1 Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

Room #2 Memoir & Biography

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Michele Roberts/Fiction

Room #2 Declan Ryan/Poetry

Readings 5:00 – 6:45

Harbor Cruise 7:00 – 9:00

Buffet Dinner on Boat

AUGUST 7TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Morning Workshop 8:00 – 12:00

Room #1 Full Manuscript Edit & Critique

Room #2 Travel Writing

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Michele Roberts/Fiction

Room #2 Connecting With Your Readers

Readings 5:00 – 7:00

Dinner at restaurant, Fishy Fishy

AUGUST 8TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Morning Workshop 8:00 – 12:00

Room #1 Josip Novakovich/Fiction & Non-Fiction

Room #2 Jacob Polley/Poetry

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Historical Fiction & Non-Fiction

Room #2 Connecting With Your Readers

Readings 5:00 – 7:00

Dinner – Free night out

AUGUST 9TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Morning Workshop 8:00 – 12:00

Room #1 Josip Novakovich/Fiction & Non-Fiction

Room #2 Jacob Polley/Poetry

Afternoon Workshop 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Historical Fiction & Non-Fiction

Room #2 Connecting With Your Readers

Readings 5:00 – 7:00

Dinner at Blue Haven

BBQ Fish dinner and Buffet afterwards we’ll listen to music in the bar

AUGUST 10TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Morning Workshops 8:00 – 12:00

Room #1 Historical Fiction & Non-Fiction

Room #2 Jacob Polley/Poetry

Afternoon Workshops 12:30 – 4:30

Room #1 Historical Fiction & Non-Fiction

Room #2 Travel Writing

Readings 5:00 – 7:00

Celebration dinner at Lemon Leaf with music

AUGUST 11TH

Breakfast 7:00 – 10:00

Departure 10:30

Please note that Delta Willis’s Travel & Food Workshop will be in two different rooms at different times.

LITERARY AGENTJEFF KLEINMAN will also be joining us for the week. Jeff will have private sessions with participants who have manuscripts.

Price

$2,250 for a shared twin room — we will do our best to match you with a perfect roommate.

$3,250 for a single room

Includes–Your choice of taking as many workshops as you want, room for 7 nights at Butlers Townhouse or Ariel House, 7 Full Irish Breakfast, Nightly Readings and Events.

Michael Ruhlman

Dinners are extra. Food is a very special part of our writers’ salon. Participants will join authors in the Dinning Room for a fabulous Four Course Dinner with French Wine. Dinner is prepared by chef Nancy Gerbault and celebrity chef Michael Ruhlman. Price is $75.00 per night.

In Mark’s workshop, you will receive constructive feedback on a poem in progress (30 line maximum) or a new poem written to the day’s assignment. He will help you identify your poem’s virtues and offer suggestions to strengthen its weaknesses. Since you already know the basics, he will encourage you to push your boundaries by taking imaginative and linguistic risks so you can make breakthroughs in your poetry.

NOEL DUFFY

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971 and studied Experimental Physics at Trinity College, Dublin. After a brief period in research he turned to writing and went on to co-edit (with Theo Dorgan) Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999).

He was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for Poetry for his collection, The Silence After , and also won The Firewords Poetry Award (Galway City Council) in 2005. A play, The Rainstorm, was produced for the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2006. His work has appeared widely in Ireland and the UK (including Poetry Ireland Review, The Financial Times and The Irish Times) as well as in the US, Belgium, Argentina and South Africa. His poetry has also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany and Today with Pat Kenny. He has been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature in 2003 and 2012. His debut collection In the Library of Lost Objects was shortlisted for the 2012 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet

Noel holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and has taught creative writing there as well as at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and scriptwriting at the Dublin Business School, Film & Media Department.

Gravity’s Angel

This workshop is aimed at those who have already written poetry and would like to explore in more depth both the general strategies that can applied to approaching subject matter and the more technical aspects of how the music of the poem can be used to ‘enact’ the meaning of the work. The morning sessions will be devoted to exploring certain key concepts using examples from poems as the basis for discussion among the participants, the spirit of which will be far more interactive than didactic. The afternoon sessions will be given over to work-shopping individual poems put forward by members of the group. The main thing is that there will be a relaxed ambiance through both morning and afternoon session and that we all enjoy it!

DEBORAH HENRY

Deborah Henry attended American College in Paris and graduated cum laude from Boston University with a minor in French language and literature. She received her MFA at Fairfield University.

Deborah Henry has been an expert guest on radio shows across America including CBS, FOX, Clear Channel, SiriusXM and Pacifica Public Radio Networks as well as on NBC, FOX and CBS television in top markets nationally.She is is graduate of the MFA program at Fairfield University. First-class novelists, including Pulitzer Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler, have provided endorsements for her debut

Workshop Description: Connecting With Your Readers

We will discuss in three part sections the myriad ways we can find our niche and connect with our readers in the digital age.

Part One: Four to Six months before publication date.

Part Two: Before and After Launch Date.

Part Three: After initial launch and onward – How to build a wider audience.

Throughout the three segments, we will have Q & A which will be organic to the flow of discussion as we share the journey — including utilizing traditional and social media skills to land an agent, an editor, a publisher, blurbs and much more as well as how to build a global writing community with ever increasing innovative marketing models.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

Open only to six students, #1 New York Times Bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard (‘The Deep End of the Ocean’) will host a full-manuscript intensive critique. Each student will receive advance digital copies of the other writers’ manuscripts and, at Lismore Castle, Mitchard will lead a full half-day session on each completed book of fiction or creative non-fiction. Admission to this class is based on individual manuscript potential, and application must be made well in advance of the conference in order to assure that the extra demands of a full-book seminar can be met. Mitchard also will provide a written critique with editing and revision suggestions to each participant. Contact conference organizer Nancy Gerbault for guidelines and specifics.

Jacquelyn Mitchard has written nine novels for adults, including several New York Times bestsellers and several that have enjoyed critical acclaim, recently winning Great Britain’s People Are Talking prize and, in 2002, named to the short list for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. She has written seven novels for Young Adults as well, and five children’s books, a memoir, Mother Less Child and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her essays also have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. Her reportage on educational issues facing American Indian children won the Hampton and Maggie Awards for Public Service Journalism. Mitchard’s work as part of Shadow Show, the anthology of short stories honoring her mentor, Ray Bradbury, currently is nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Audie Awards. She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards, and her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press, a new realistic YA Fiction imprint. A Chicago native, Mitchard grew up the daughter of a plumber and a hardware store clerk who met as rodeo riders. A member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa tribe, she is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. Mitchard taught Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction at Fairfield University and was the first Faculty Fellow at Southern New Hampshire University. Her upcoming YA novel, What We Lost in the Dark, will be published in January by Soho Teen. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children.

T.S. ELIOT PRIZE WINNER, SINEAD MORRISSEY

Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast and currently lectures.

Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. The same collection won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize in 2005. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for “distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work”. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.

In 2013 Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax.The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was ‘politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’

BOOKER FINALIST, JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

Josip Novakovich will be teaching a Fiction/Nonfiction Workshop for us in Dublin.

Josip Novakovich emigrated from Croatia to the United States at the age of 20, and recently to Canada at the age of 53. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day (in ten languages), a novella in three forms, Three Deaths, and story collection (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters) and three collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work was anthologized inBest American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection and O. Henry Prize Stories. He received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award and an American Book Award, and in 2013 he was a Man Booker Internatinal Award Finalist. Novakovich has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library and has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State and now Concordia University in Montreal. This fall, Esplanade Books will publish his most recent collection of stories in Canada. He is revising a novel, Rubble of Bubles, and putting together another story collection, New and Selected.

Workshop Description:

The Art of the Microforms

A Multi-genre course, concentrating on the short forms, from a short paragraph to vignettes up to approximately 1500 words. The boundaries between narrative poems, lyrical essay, and flash fiction are frequently arbitrary, so let’s not worry about the definition of what we do in the short form, and play. The definition can come later.

Course Objective: To play with words in order to come up with good moments.

Come to class with several short pieces for us to give you constructive feedback now how to revise and improve.

The class time will be divided among the following activities:

Critiquing your work constructively.Analyzing published paradigms of short form writing.Sketching and writing vignettes from prompts and assignments.Even in the short form, the elements of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction can be at play productively, so we will concentrate on plotting stories from the basic motives. Man is his desire, sid Aristoteles. We’ll sketch several stories based on primary motives, desire and fear.

Paradigms of microforms to be discussed and covered:

Examples of quick writingGrace Paley, Robert Coover

2. Myths, Parables

Story of Jonah, Prodigal Son. Tolstoy’s, Three Parables. Johann Peter Hebe, Man is a Strange Creature.

3. Fables and Fairy Tales

Aesop, Brothers Grimm

4. Short-Shorts

Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Hemingway

5. Flash Fiction

Lydia Davis, Jonathan Wilson, Diane Williams, Dave Eggers

6. Absurdist and Surrealist Stories

Etgar Keret, Daniil Kharms, Dino Buzzati, Aimee Bender

7. The Lyrical Essay

Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf

8. Very Short Essay, True Story

Mikhail Iossel, Why…, JN, “Ice”

9 Story as one scene:

The Use of Force by William Carlos William. http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html

Michele Roberts is an English writer of mixed French-English background, the author of numerous highly acclaimed novels, dramas, poems, short stories and essays. She examines the nature of love and the female identity, based on her experience as a woman, of two cultures – French and English, and, later, comparing women through history blurring time, paces, and identities. This way she attempts to re-write the history and to imagine what the future might have been in the light of different historical events. Inspired by the Feminist Movement, she is deeply concerned with the identity of women, but not only the way society view it. She pictures the women as a productive and successful member of society, but also as an individual in search for true self, regardless of social restrains. Her heroines are “whole”, individuals who recognize and live in peace with their own contradictions and differences. They love, interrogate the nature of love, sexuality and explore the possibility of sharing the experience in more than one-way, symbolically representing a conflict between the public and the private, and modes associated with masculinity and femininity.One of the most significant themes in her work is the mother-daughter relationship. Her style uniquely combines fantasies and myths, described in classical and religious language.She was Poetry Editor for Spare Rib (1974) and City Limits magazine (1981), formed a writers’ collective (with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns) as a feminist activist with the Women’s Liberation Movement, serves as a Chair of the British Council literature advisory panel, and is a regular book reviewer and broadcaster (contributor to “Night Waves” and “Woman’s Hour”), as well as a strong literary translation supporter.She won the Gay News Literary Award 1978 for “Piece of the Night”, the W.H.Smith Literary Award 1993 for “Daughters of the House.” Michele Roberts is Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

CREATIVE JUICES OF FOOD AND SEX

One of the pieces of advice I offer in the morning workshop to students tackling writer’s block is to have something delicious to eat. Another tip is to practise automatic writing. Given a phrase, you then write non-stop for three minutes, whatever comes up, without censoring. A good way to get the juices flowing is to begin with “I hate” or “I am disgusted by . . .” Hate and disgust are helpful energies and provoke original writing.”

None of us gets nostalgic about school dinners, do we? From primary school, I remember fatty mutton in greasy gravy. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, semolina pudding, macaroni in warmish sweetened milk. Slimy and disgusting. At secondary school, a convent, the nuns’ speciality was carrots boiled to a pulp, tasting of soap. Slimy. Or spinach, bitter and sour and, yes, slimy. Too close in texture and appearance to spit and sick, to all those bodily wastes we shun, which the feminist author Julia Kristeva calls “the abject”. Giving an abstract name to wanting to throw up helps keep it at bay. Kristeva refers somewhere to “those currents of bodily feeling we call emotion”. In the writing workshop, we begin by translating abstract words like bliss and desire and contentment into sensual, physical images.

GABRIELLE SELZ

3 Day Memoir Intensive

The American essayist and poet, Kenneth Rexroth wrote, “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act.” Memoir is a creative act, one that marks the intersection of truth and storytelling.

Whether writing personal essay-length pieces or a book, this workshop will show you how to best tell the stories from your life.Together, we will analyze methods for creating a narrative through imaginative reconstruction. Participants will be asked to submit a 2,500-word sample—a stand-alone essay or an excerpt.

After introductions, we will begin with a series of essential questions that will guide us in clarifying and defining our projects. The answers are meant to be flexible, opening us up to an ongoing process that will help illuminate our material and choices as we progress.

Over the course of our three days together, each writer’s work will be work- shopped in a safe, honest environment. The whole group will help the writer identify what is unique and exciting in their work, as well as what might be getting in their way. If you are embarking on something new, it is okay to submit a skeletal description. We will then focus on helping you sketch and fill out your memoir project.

We will emphasize issues of craft with discussions on:

 Prologue: How to hook readers, set up the stakes and foreshadow the arc of the story.

 Structure: How to shape through Conflict and Turning Points.

 Character/Dialogue: Making characters dimensional through desire and contrast.

 Desire Line: Ask yourself, “What did I want more than anything else? What is my underlying question, my underlying want?” Create a desire line. It’s all about wanting.

 Writing the personal outward and within the context of history.

 Setting/Place: Creating setting, mood and emotion of place.

 Emotional authenticity

 Theme and how to weave it in so that it informs all the aspects of the story.

 Revision and its various stages.

 The Business/The Writing Life

TRAVEL & FOOD WRITING

MICHAEL RUHLMAN and DELTA WILLIS

MICHAEL RUHLMAN wrote more than twenty books, mostly about food and cooking, half with chefs, some non-food non-fiction, and a lot of opinions here on the fundamental importance of food and cooking to our families, our communities, our world. He

Michael co-authored four cookbooks with celebrity chef, Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry. He was a contributor to the Alinea Cookbook with chef, Grant Achatz’s tour de force on the new cuisine. He wrote Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing.

Michael has been on several television shows, “Cooking Under Fire” on PBS, a judge on “Next Iron Chef” and “Iron Chef America”. He has also been a featured guest on Travel Channel’s “Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”–Las Vegas and Cleveland episodes.

Michael is a James Beard Award Winning Cookbook writer. List of some of his books: How to Braise, How to Roast, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, Ruhlman’s Twenty, Ration: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing, The Book of Schmaltz, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen, Salumi, Books about Chefs and Professional Cooks, The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooking in the Age of Celebrity, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, A Return to Cooking with Eric Ripert, Michael Symon’s Live to Cook, Ad Hoc at Home, Bouchon, The French Laundry Cookbook, Under Pressure.

DELTA WILLIS A member of The Explorers Club, Delta Willis profiled Richard Leakey for The Hominid Gang and has written for Adventure Travel, Audubon, Diversion, Outside, People and The New York Times. A former publicist for the National Audubon Society and Earthwatch, she tracked lions in Kenya. She is currently writing My Boat in the City, about living onboard her houseboat at New York’s 79th St. Boat Basin, base camp for journeys to Africa, Australia, China, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.In the footsteps of James Joyce, we’ll become flaneurs, discovering the streets and tastes that inspired him.

Willis will teach the first 3 days on travel writing, then chef MICHAEL RUHLMAN, will lead the group. A James Beard award-winning author of 20 books including 4 co-authored with chef Thomas Keller of the French Laundry, one of the top 50 restaurants in the world,

EXPLORING OFF THE BEATEN PATH

In the footsteps of James Joyce, we’ll become flaneurs, discovering the streets, alleys and voices that inspired Joyce to employ Homer’s Odyssey. “I always write about Dublin,” Joyce explained; “because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” In a shrinking universe, we’ll focus on how your travel reports can tap readers’ hunger for discovery (including themselves) gain insights from other cultures, and travel frugally and sustainably. Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown challenges us to taste a region with our senses, and taps the power of video in storytelling, which demands at least one visit to a classic pub with music. We’ll seek new ways to cover a popular destination, revisit adventure travel in the age of Siri, and discuss how to profile, or become, a modern-day explorer or digital nomad. How To Pitch your stories to editors, and other industry tips will be one day’s workshop, but most classes will focus on feedback to your submissions, how to discover the particular that is universal, and finding mentors beyond Joyce to follow.

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Sinead will be teaching a workshop on December 12th & 13th from 10:00 – 5:00. She will also be giving a reading on Saturday night the 12th of December.

Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast and currently lectures.

Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. The same collection won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize in 2005. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for “distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work”. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.

In 2013, Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax. The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was ‘politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’

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Barbara Mossberg is dedicated to poetry in the civic ethos (“no place safe from poetry”) in roles ranging from President of Goddard College to one of California community Poet Laureates, Poet in Residence, Pacific Grove (CA), humanities activist, cultural diplomat, dramaturg, playwright, actor, literary critic, and professor (Clark Honors College, University of Oregon), as well as founder and host of the weekly hour Poetry Slow Down (Radiomonterey.com, podcast BarbaraMossberg.com, @BarbaraMossberg), “the news without which men die miserably every day” (William Carlos Williams), plating lyric recipes for living. In poetry slams (“old lady moxie, strutting her poetic gear”), YouTube, poetry flash mobs, lit crawls, arts and culture blogs on Huffington Post, lectures worldwide on poetry and culture from Yosemite National Park and Oregon Country Fair, to Chulalonghorn and Oxford Universities, dramaturgy (Cherry Center (CA), Oxford Playhouse (UK), 58E59 (Off-Broadway), and scholarship of poetry’s role in transformational cultural leadership, Dr. Mossberg celebrates the power of the word to change the world. As Senior Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer, Bicentennial Chair of American Studies at the University of Helsinki, and Fulbright Professor University of Rome American Poetry Seminar, and in her federal appointment as U.S. Scholar in Residence (USIA), Mossberg has lectured and read in over twenty countries. A prizewinning international poet, teacher, and scholar, her academic book on Emily Dickinson was Choice Outstanding Book of the Year in 1982. Mossberg is a contributor to Tupelo Press erotic poems anthology, Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke, one of a set of poets contributing daily on-line postings to the fundraising 30-30 project to support literary translations, the Spring Creek Trillium Project/Writer in Residence at Shotpouch Creek, Oregon State University; recent poetry is in Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Series, Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror Is Not You and appears in New Millennium Writings, Cider Press Review, Tupelo Quarterly Launch Edition, and others; honors include Semi-Finalist: the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize, Snowbound Chapbook Award, Sunken Gardens Chapbook Award, and Word Works Washington Prize. A Mellon Fellow and recipient of NEH and ACLS Awards, as well as the Jane Grant Award from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon, Dr. Mossberg attended the Colrain Manuscript Conference, and has been invited for poetry retreats with A Room of Her Own (Ghost Ranch, NM), In Claritas (Assisi, Italy, Seattle, WA), Lilly Arctic Institute and Lilly Conference (Poet in Residence), Transformational Leadership Retreat (Kalamazoo, MI), Aspen Institute (Wye, Maryland, Aspen, CO), and as regular speaker on poetry for the International Leadership Association (London, Prague, Denver, Asilomar, CA). A Professor of Practice at the Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, and Global Education Professor with the Department of International Education, teaching green and revolutionary imagination, epic, drama, and eco-literature, she has been writing and publishing poetry and criticism since age twelve ($2 payment). Mossberg, a mother of two and wife of over forty years, does research on creativity and aging.Three Legs in the Afternoon, focuses on poetry written between ages 50 to 100. Her book project is “the power of nobody to change the world, the unlikely role of poetry and music in civil and human rights, war and peace, and the environment.” Well-known inspirational speaker and fundraiser for the role of humanities in resilience, she is 67, and appears with a detaching vitreous but new right hip, “King Lear on the outside, but the Fool on the inside.”

Alison Carb Sussman won the Abroad Writers’ Conference/Finishing Line Press Authors Poetry Contest for her poems “Acting Like a Woman” and “Reuniting With Mother at the Zoo.” She was awarded a full conference registration and stay at the Butlers Townhouse in Dublin from December 12th to 19th, 2015. Her chapbook, “On the Edge,” a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2012, was published by FLP in 2013. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times and other publications. Alison was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015. She lives and writes in New York City.

JOANNE PREISER

JoAnne Preiser lives, writes and teaches in Massachusetts. She received a MA from the University of Massachusetts where she worked with Martha Collins. More recently JoAnne worked with Brookline poet and teacher, Judith Steinbergh, and with Barbara Helfgott Hyett of Poems Works in Boston.

As a high school Englishteacher JoAnne has been instrumental in bringing poetry into the school system. She created a Poetry Workshop class for juniors and seniors and has brought a number of poets to her school.

Publications include: Penwood Review, IRIS and Pyramid Magazine. She received an Honorable Mention from the Friends of Acadia Journal, and won third place in The Ledge’s 2006 poetry competition and first place in the 2005 Inkwell poetry competition.

The newest member of FineLine Poets, JoAnne is happy to work with such talented and dedicated poets.

MARY COSTELLO

Mary Costello debut novel, Academy Street, is published by Canongate, it won the Eason Novel of the Year award, the pre-eminent category in the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards 2014.Costello, whose short story collection The China Factory was first published by Stinging Fly in 2012 and positively reviewed in The Irish Times, faces stiff competition from five more well-established authors, Colm Tóibín (Nora Webster), Joseph O’Connor (The Thrill of it All), David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks), John Kelly (From Out of the City) and John Boyne (A History of Loneliness), the current Irish Times Book Club selection.

SINEAD MORRISSEY

Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast and currently lectures.

Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. The same collection won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize in 2005. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for “distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work”. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.

In January 2014 Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax.The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was ‘politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’

December 13

NOEL DUFFY

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971 and studied Experimental Physics at Trinity College, Dublin. After a brief period in research he turned to writing and went on to co-edit (with Theo Dorgan) Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999).

He was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for Poetry for his collection, The Silence After , and also won The Firewords Poetry Award (Galway City Council) in 2005. A play, The Rainstorm, was produced for the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2006. His work has appeared widely in Ireland and the UK (including Poetry Ireland Review, The Financial Times and The Irish Times) as well as in the US, Belgium, Argentina and South Africa. His poetry has also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany and Today with Pat Kenny. He has been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature in 2003 and 2012. His debut collection In the Library of Lost Objects was shortlisted for the 2012 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet

Noel holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and has taught creative writing there as well as at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and scriptwriting at the Dublin Business School, Film & Media Department.

MARILYN ASCHOFF MELLOR

Marilyn Mellor is a Pediatric Physician and an poet. She received her MFA at Hamline University. She published North Woods Refuge with Finishing Line Press.

BARBARA KNOTTBarbara Knott is host of The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon, an online literary and art journal based in Atlanta where she lives. She has a Ph.D. from the drama therapy program at New York University. Publications include poems in Permafrost, New Millennium Writings, and Minerva Rising, as well as a short story in The Distillery and articles in Pilgrimage. Her novel Muscadine has been short-listed in the James Jones First Novel competition and excerpted for publication in Now and Then. In 2009, Nikki Giovanni chose her poem “Boxwood” as winner of first prize in the New Millennium Writings’ Awards 28 poetry competition. Francois Camoin selected her short story “Song of the Goat Man” as winner of third prize in the Writers@Work 2010 fiction competition. The Atlanta Writers Club named her short story “The Legend of Abigail Jones” as their spring 2014 first prize winner of the Wild Card competition. Her first chapbook of poems, Soul Mining, was published by Finishing Line Press in summer 2011, and her second, MANTA Poems, in spring 2015.Website: grapevineartandsoulsalon.comShe says of her work:I am interested in the world and its diversity of creatures and in what makes us human and in whatever lies in the depths of human experience, where oppositions lay down their arms, where the erotic meets the sacred, and where serious sits down with humor to sort it all out.My goal as a writer of fiction and poetry is to get the reader to feel part of an ongoing conversation I am having with myself about themes and images that appeal to my imagination, and to become as excited about them as I am.

GWEN BURNYEAT

Gwen Burnyeat was born in Cambridge UK nd is currently teaching Political Anthropology at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, where she is a Masters/PhD candidate in social anthropology and a Leverhulme Trust Study-Abroad Scholar She is a Student Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Association of Social Anthropologists, and a member of The Bogotá Writers Club. She holds a BA and M.Phil. in Literature from the Universities of Leeds and Cambridge, has lived in Colombia since 2010, working in Human Rights organisations including the International Centre for Transitional Justice and Peace Brigades International.She has published academic articles in both English and Spanish, on transitional justice and community peace initiatives in Colombia, as well as short fiction and literary essays in books and magazines, frequently drawing on her experience in humanitarian work from Colombia’s war-torn farming communities.Latest publications include ‘The Banana Republic of Urabá’, in Was Gabo an Irishman? Tales from Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombia (2015) and ‘Two Rivers’, a short story in The Dublin Review (2014). She is currently researching the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, writing her thesis, selling organic chocolate and producing a film documentary with co-director Pablo Mejía Trujillo called ‘Chocolate of Peace’ (Chocolate de Paz), forthcoming 2016.

RUTH PADEL

The weekly column Ruth wrote for the Independent on Sunday from 1998 to 2001 helped foster a wider appreciation of poetry among readers across the UK. She expanded these columns in two popular books, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), in which she discussed 52 contemporary poems and explained how and why poetry developed as it did in 1980′s Britain, and The Poem and the Journey (2006), which discussed 60 poems by a wide range of British, Irish and American poets from popular and mainstream to modernist, around the image of the “journey of life”, suggesting ways of reading a poem as a journey of thought and sound.

In 2004-6 Ruth was Chair of the UK Poetry Society, overhauled the Society’s Constitution and oversaw the creation of poetry “Stanzas” across the UK, linking local poetry groups to the Society.

In 2008 she gave the Bloodaxe Lectures on poetry at Newcastle University, published as Silent Letters of the Alphabet, which addresses poetry’s use of silence and white space; and explores questions of metaphor, voice and tone.

In 2009 Ruth became the first woman to be elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. The election took place amid a media storm over unproven allegations of a smear campaign against Derek Walcott, the other main contender for the post. Ruth resigned, not wanting to be drawn into continuing controversy over her election.

In 2011 Ruth gave the Housman Lecture at Hay on Wye Books Festival, published by the Housman Society as The Name and Nature of Poetry, and began presenting Radio 4’s pioneer series POETRY WORKSHOP which ran for two years with poetry groups across the UK. Other broadcasts on poetry includes talks on Tennyson and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

December 14

MOLLY SCOTT

As a musician, performer, and recording artist, Molly Scott has devoted her performing and songwriting career to supporting issues of peace and social justice. As a therapist and educator, Dr. Scott has focused her clinical work and research on the role that vocal resonance plays in the healing process, particularly in the treatment of trauma.

A pioneer in the use of the voice in therapy, Molly Scott began to develop her healing work with the voice as a young singer when she became curious about the effect her own voice had upon her feelings and her health. She began leading groups in the 1970’s and has expanded her work with the voice and healing into a therapeutic model called Creative Resonance which she has been teaching for more than twenty years in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Trained in individual and family therapy, she also has training in EMDR, and Cranio-sacral therapy. Her Creative Resonance work includes the Deep Story protocol for treatment of trauma, and Sound as Touch sonic bodywork. She is the director of the Creative Resonance Institute, which offers trainings in the use of voice to healing professionals. She also works with singers, musicians, and writers in heightening creativity and performance and presentation skills.

Scott first came to Western Massachusetts as a Smith College student where she started her professional career as an undergraduate, singing on both the East and West coast in clubs and coffeehouses. On finishing her degree she moved to New York where she was part of the early folk music revival of the 60’s along with peers Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. She was the first performer at the legendary Greenwich Village folk club, Gerde’s Folk City.

After making her first album,”Waitin’ On You” with Prestige Records in the early 60’s, Scott moved to broaden her scope from folk music to theater and television and made a successful career in New York as singer, actor and performer, including recording, theater, film, and hosting her own television show on CBS. She also frequently appeared on children’s television shows including Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street.

She moved back to Western Massachusetts with her family in the 1970s, started the musical group “Sumitra”, and turned her musical and compositional talents towards supporting peace and environmental causes. Acknowledging that her desire to “teach and help people” had always been strong factor in her work with music, Scott eventually returned to school to receive a masters and doctoral degree in Consulting Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She teaches counseling at Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, N.H, has a private practice in Shelburne Falls and Charlemont, MA and is on staff with the MSPCC Family Counseling Center in Greenfield, MA. Her poems have appeared in several journals and she is working on a collection of her poetry and a book on the role of voice in therapy

Widely known in the New England area for her music, Scott has performed with the Mohawk Trail Concerts, the Springfield Symphony, the Iron Horse Music Hall, and given many benefits for peace and environmental causes. She has made nine recordings including We Are All One Planet, Honor the Earth, Sound of Light, and a live audience recording from after 9-11, called Sanctuary: Songs of Hope and Healing, all on the Sumitra label.

JESSICA PURDY

Jessica Purdy teaches Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University. In 2014, she was nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.

GABRIELLE SELZ

Gabrielle Selz is a writer and a live storyteller. Combining her dual passions for words and images, she holds a BA in art history from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in writing from City College of New York. She has worked in commercial television and on the political campaigns of two Greek democratic presidential candidates: Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. She is the recipient of a fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Moth Story Slam winner. She has published in magazines and newspapers including, The New Yorker, The New York Times, More magazine, Los Angeles Times, Fiction, Newsday, and Art Papers. She now writes art reviews for The Huffington Post, and you can read her blog about art and life.

MEDBH MCGUCKIAN

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 to Catholic parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and later returned as the university’s first female writer-in-residence.

McGuckian’s poems are layered collages of feminine and domestic imagery complicated by a liminal, active syntax that, in drawing attention to the weight of one phrase on another, emphasizes and questions our constructions of power and gender. Her work is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes. Praising McGuckian’s Selected Poems (1997), Seamus Heaney said, “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.”

McGuckian has earned significant critical acclaim over the course of her career. Her poem “The Flitting,” published under a male pseudonym, won the 1979 National Poetry Competition. In 1980 McGuckian published two chapbooks of poetry and also won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. On Ballycastle Beach (1988) won the Cheltenham Award, and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2007) was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. She won the Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.”

She edited The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) and co-translated, with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (1999). She is the author most recently of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999), and the poetry collections My Love Has Fared Inland (2010) and The High Caul Cap (2013).

MICHELE ROBERTS

Michele Roberts is an English writer of mixed French-English background, the author of numerous highly acclaimed novels, dramas, poems, short stories and essays. She examines the nature of love and the female identity, based on her experience as a woman, of two cultures – French and English, and, later, comparing women through history blurring time, paces, and identities. This way she attempts to re-write the history and to imagine what the future might have been in the light of different historical events. Inspired by the Feminist Movement, she is deeply concerned with the identity of women, but not only the way society view it. She pictures the women as a productive and successful member of society, but also as an individual in search for true self, regardless of social restrains. Her heroines are “whole”, individuals who recognize and live in peace with their own contradictions and differences. They love, interrogate the nature of love, sexuality and explore the possibility of sharing the experience in more than one-way, symbolically representing a conflict between the public and the private, and modes associated with masculinity and femininity. One of the most significant themes in her work is the mother-daughter relationship. Her style uniquely combines fantasies and myths, described in classical and religious language. She was Poetry Editor for Spare Rib (1974) and City Limits magazine (1981), formed a writers’ collective (with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns) as a feminist activist with the Women’s Liberation Movement, serves as a Chair of the British Council literature advisory panel, and is a regular book reviewer and broadcaster (contributor to “Night Waves” and “Woman’s Hour”), as well as a strong literary translation supporter. She won the Gay News Literary Award 1978 for “Piece of the Night”, the W.H.Smith Literary Award 1993 for “Daughters of the House.” Michele Roberts is Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

December 15

LINDA IBBOTSON

Linda Ibbotson was born in Sheffield, England, lived in Switzerland and Germany and travelled extensively before finally settling in County Cork, S. Ireland 20 years ago.

A poet, artist and photographer her poetry and essays have been published in various international journals including Episteme, Levure Litteraire 9 and 10, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review XX, Iodine and forthcoming a future issue of Poetry Bus. Her poetry and paintings have been published in the newspaper Eastern World Uzbekistan and her book reviews have appeared in a number of international journals and newspapers.

She has had poetry read on radio in Australia and formerly written a regular poetry feature in Musicians Together on-line music journal and a feature for Plum Books UK. She was interviewed on CRY 104 fm radio, Youghal, Ireland. Linda was also invited to read at the Abroad Writers’ Conference, Lismore Castle, Lismore, Co. Waterford, Ireland in December 2013. Her poem “A Celtic Legacy” was performed in France at a number of venues including 59 Rivoli, Paris and on French radio by Irish musician and performer Davog Rynne. Linda was invited in May 2015 to be one of the 3 judges for the Rabindranath Tagore Award International in India. Her painting “Cascade” was used as a CD cover “OUTSIDE” by Irish musician Tony Floyd Kenna.

WANITA ZUMBRUNNEN

Wanita Zumbrunnen has a PH.D in American and Russian Literature from the University of Iowa. She has won Awards at the St. Louis Poetry Center; appeared in Inspirations, a publication of Quald-E-Azam Library in Pakistan, The Cloverdale Review, the University of Iowa’s Daily Palette, and received International Publication Awards in 1996 and 2000 from the Atlantic Review. In 2012 Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, All Mortals Shall Dream Dreams. In 2014, she attended the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Lake Como, Italy. She is assembling a 70 to 100 page manuscript of travel poems based on her travels in Pakistan, to which she received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1988 and 1992, and in Japan, Germany, Kosovo and Turkey, where she taught on military bases from 1996 to 2010.

MICHAEL RUHLMAN

MICHAEL RUHLMAN wrote more than twenty books, mostly about food and cooking, half with chefs, some non-food non-fiction, and a lot of opinions here on the fundamental importance of food and cooking to our families, our communities, our world. He

Michael co-authored four cookbooks with celebrity chef, Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry. He was a contributor to the Alinea Cookbook with chef, Grant Achatz’s tour de force on the new cuisine. He wrote Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing.

Michael has been on several television shows, “Cooking Under Fire” on PBS, a judge on “Next Iron Chef” and “Iron Chef America”. He has also been a featured guest on Travel Channel’s “Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”–Las Vegas and Cleveland episodes.

Michael is a James Beard Award Winning Cookbook writer. List of some of his books: How to Braise, How to Roast, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, Ruhlman’s Twenty, Ration: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing, The Book of Schmaltz, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen, Salumi, Books about Chefs and Professional Cooks, The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooking in the Age of Celebrity, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, A Return to Cooking with Eric Ripert, Michael Symon’s Live to Cook, Ad Hoc at Home, Bouchon, The French Laundry Cookbook, Under Pressure.

DELTA WILLIS

A member of The Explorers Club, Delta Willis profiled Richard Leakey for The Hominid Gang and has written for Adventure Travel, Audubon, Diversion, Outside, People and The New York Times. A former publicist for the National Audubon Society and Earthwatch, she tracked lions in Kenya. She is currently writing My Boat in the City, about living onboard her houseboat at New York’s 79th St. Boat Basin, base camp for journeys to Africa, Australia, China, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

JOHN BOYNE

John Boyne was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1971, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where I was awarded the Curtis Brown prize.

He published 9 novels for adults and five for younger readers, including The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas which was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was made into a Miramax feature film. It has sold more than 6 million copies worldwide.

He was a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times and have been a judge for both the Hennessy Literary Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I am currently chair of the jury for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada.

In 2012, he was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for my body of work. I have also won 3 Irish Book Awards, for Children’s Book of the Year, People’s Choice Book of the Year and Short Story of the Year. I have won a number of international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia.

John’s novels are published in 48 languages.

John’s most recent adult novel, A HISTORY OF LONELINESS, is published in the UK by Doubleday and in the USA by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

His first collection of short stories, BENEATH THE EARTH, is published in the UK by Doubleday.

A new novel for younger readers, THE BOY AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN, was published in the UK/Ireland in October 2015 and will be available in the US and in foreign language editions during 2016.

December 16

THEODORA ZIOLKOWKI

Theodora Ziolkowski’s chapbook of poems, A Place Made Red, is forthcoming this year from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Short FICTION (England), and Gargoyle Magazine, among other journals and anthologies. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Vermont and is a candidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where she teaches English Composition. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee for 2014.

DOUGLAS COLE

Douglas Cole is a winner of the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in poetry (judged by T.R. Hummer). He has a B.A. in English Literature and an M.A. in Creative Writing. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife and two sons and teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Seattle Central Community College.

DEBORAH HENRY

Deborah Henry attended American College in Paris and graduated cum laude from Boston University with a minor in French language and literature. She received her MFA at Fairfield University. Deborah Henry has been an expert guest on radio shows across America including CBS, FOX, Clear Channel, SiriusXM and Pacifica Public Radio Networks as well as on NBC, FOX and CBS television in top markets nationally.She is is graduate of the MFA program at Fairfield University. First-class novelists, including Pulitzer Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler, have provided endorsements for her debut

Deborah Henry’s debut novel, The Whipping Club, “Named to Kirkus Best of 2012”. It was also listed on Oprah’s best 10 reads of summer 2012.

JOHN BANVILLE

William John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, the youngest of three siblings. He was educated at Christian Brothers schools and St Peter’s College, Wexford. After college John worked as a clerk for Ireland’s national airline, Aer Lingus, before joining The Irish Press as a sub-editor in 1969. Continuing with journalism for over thirty years, John was Literary Editor at The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999.

John’s first book, Long Lankin, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, came out in 1971, followed byBirchwood (1973), Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter(1982), Mefisto (1986), The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), Athena(1995), The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), The Sea (2005),The Infinities (2009) and Ancient Light (2012). His non-fiction book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, was published in 2003 as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Writer and the City’ series. In 2012, an anthology comprising extracts from John’s fifteen novels to date, together with selections drawn from his dramatic works and various reviews, was published under the title, Possessed of a Past: A John Banville Reader.

Among the awards John’s novels have won are the Allied Irish Banks fiction prize, the American-Irish Foundation award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, theGuardian Fiction Prize. In 1989 The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was awarded the first Guinness Peat Aviation Award; in Italian, as La Spiegazione dei Fatti, the book was awarded the 1991 Premio Ennio Flaiano. Ghostswas shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Prize 1993; The Untouchable for the same prize in 1997. In 2003 John was awarded the Premio Nonino. He has also received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation in the US. In 2005, John won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Last year, John was awarded the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature.

Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, John has published the following crime novels: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), The Lemur (2008), Elegy for April (2010), A Death in Summer (2011) and Vengeance (2012). Later this year, Mantle will publish Holy Orders, the sixth book in the Quirke series. The first three have been adapted by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson for the BBC, and will be broadcast later this autumn, starring Gabriel Byrne in the title role.

John (again writing as Benjamin Black) has also been commissioned by theRaymond Chandler Estate to pen a new Philip Marlowe novel which will be published by Holt in the US in 2014.

December 17

CATHERINE MOORE

Catherine Moore’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Tahoma Literary Review, Southeast Review, Cider Press Review, Southampton Review, Blue Fifth Review, and in anthologies most recently by Pankhearst Press. Her poems have garnered First Place prizes with both the Mississippi and Alabama State Poetry Society Contests. She is the winner of the Southeast Review’s 2014 Gearhart poetry prize and has work selected for “The Best Small Fictions of 2015” anthology by guest judge Robert Olen Butler. Her chapbook “Story” is available with Finishing Line Press. Selections from this book were featured on Nashville area television, Poets From the Neighbourhood.

Catherine helped shepherd the creation of a literary & arts journal, Tampa Review Online and served as the Poetry Editor. She currently is a Guest Editor at Toe Good Poetry and reviews poetry books for literary journals, such as Prick of the Spindle and Up the Staircase.

VICTORIA KORTH

Professional Organizations: American Psychiatric Association, New York State Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, Monroe County Medical Society, Poetry Society of America.

Victoria has an MA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY College at Brockport. She was long listed twice by the Montreal International Poetry Contest and she was a finalist in May Swenson First Poetry Book Award, University of Colorado Press. She won first prize for a single poem, Newtowner Magazine International Poetry Contest. She’s written two books, Cord Color (Finishing Line Press( and Tender Warnings: Narrative Tension in Lyric Poetry with State University of New York, College at Brockport.

BRITT TISDALE STATON

Britt Tisdale Staton–is a psychotherapist and creativity consultant with a master’s degree in Counseling and an MFA in Creative Writing. She works with writers, artists and performers at Alive Studios, her private practice in downtown Orlando, Fla. Britt is an adjunct professor at Rollins College, and her own short stories have placed in contests by Bellingham Review, Ruminate Journal, and the Royal Palm Literary Award.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

Open only to six students, #1 New York Times Bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard (‘The Deep End of the Ocean’) will host a full-manuscript intensive critique. Each student will receive advance digital copies of the other writers’ manuscripts and, at Lismore Castle, Mitchard will lead a full half-day session on each completed book of fiction or creative non-fiction. Admission to this class is based on individual manuscript potential, and application must be made well in advance of the conference in order to assure that the extra demands of a full-book seminar can be met. Mitchard also will provide a written critique with editing and revision suggestions to each participant. Contact conference organizer Nancy Gerbault for guidelines and specifics.

Jacquelyn Mitchard has written nine novels for adults, including several New York Times bestsellers and several that have enjoyed critical acclaim, recently winning Great Britain’s People Are Talking prize and, in 2002, named to the short list for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. She has written seven novels for Young Adults as well, and five children’s books, a memoir, Mother Less Child and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her essays also have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. Her reportage on educational issues facing American Indian children won the Hampton and Maggie Awards for Public Service Journalism. Mitchard’s work as part of Shadow Show, the anthology of short stories honoring her mentor, Ray Bradbury, currently is nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Audie Awards. She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards, and her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press, a new realistic YA Fiction imprint. A Chicago native, Mitchard grew up the daughter of a plumber and a hardware store clerk who met as rodeo riders. A member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa tribe, she is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. Mitchard taught Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction at Fairfield University and was the first Faculty Fellow at Southern New Hampshire University. Her upcoming YA novel, What We Lost in the Dark, will be published in January by Soho Teen. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children.

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

Josip Novakovich emigrated from Croatia to the United States at the age of 20, and recently to Canada at the age of 53. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day (in ten languages), a novella in three forms, Three Deaths, and story collection (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters) and three collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop. His work was anthologized inBest American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection and O. Henry Prize Stories. He received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award and an American Book Award, and in 2013 he was a Man Booker Internatinal Award Finalist. Novakovich has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library and has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State and now Concordia University in Montreal. This fall, Esplanade Books will publish his most recent collection of stories in Canada. He is revising a novel, Rubble of Bubles, and putting together another story collection, New and Selected.

December 18

JUDY MICHAELS

Dr. Judy Rowe Michaels is the author of three poetry collection, The Forest of Wild Hands (University Press of Florida), Reviewing the Skull (WordTech Editions), and most recently a chapbook, Ghost Notes (Finishing Line Press). Formerly poet-in-residence at Princeton Day School, she is currently a poet-in-the-schools for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She has received the 2015 New Jersey Poets Prize, the Daniel Varoujan Award from the New England Poetry Club, two poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Arts Council, and two residencies from the MacDowell Colony. The National Council of Teachers of English has published her three books on teaching creative writing, most recently Catching Tigers in Red Weather. Her current poetry manuscript was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Prize. An eighteen-year cancer patient, she speaks on ovarian cancer at medical schools in the New York area through the national program STS, Survivors Teaching Students, Saving Women’s Lives.

TERRY BLACKHAWK

Terry Blackhawk is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections of poetry including Escape Artist, winner of the John Ciardi Prize, as well as The Dropped Hand and The Light Between, both available from Wayne State University Press. Among her awards are six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Foley Poetry Award, The Springfed Arts Prize and the 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod International. Her work has appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and in Numerous anthologies including Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry and When She Named Fire: Contemporary Poems by American Women. She is a 2013 Krege Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow. In 1995, Blackhawk founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO), Detroit’s acclaimed writers-in-schools program, which she directed until her retirement in June 2015. WSU Press has just released To Light a Fire: Twenty Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a collection of essays co-edited with iO Senior Writer Peter Markus.

ETHEL ROHAN

Ethel Rohan’s first novel, The Kingdom Keeper, will publish from St. Martin’s Press in early 2017. She is also the author of two story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for The Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. She wrote, too, the award-winning chapbook Hard to Say (PANK) and the award-winning e-memoir single, Out of Dublin (Shebooks).

Winner of the 2013 Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the CUIRT, Roberts, and Bristol Short Story Prizes, her work has or will appear in The New York Times, World Literature Today, PEN America, Tin House Online, The Irish Times, BREVITY Magazine, and The Rumpus, among many others. She has reviewed books for New York Journal of Books, and elsewhere.

Her most recent work appeared in the anthologies THE LINEUP: 20 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015); Winesburg, Indiana (Indiana University Press, 2015); DRIVEL: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors (Penguin: Perigee, 2014). She is also a contributor and associate editor to the anthology Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015).

She will/has guest-lectured and/or taught writing at Book Passage; San Francisco State University; the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto; San Francisco Writers’ Conference; Green Mountain Writers Conference; The London Short Story Festival; The Abroad Writers’ Conference; and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival, among others. She received her MFA in fiction from Mills College, CA, 2004. Raised in Dublin, Ireland, Ethel Rohan lives in San Francisco where she is a member of The Writers’ Grotto and PEN America.

KEVIN BARRY

Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of two collections of short stories, and the novel City of Bohane, which was the winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Born in Limerick, Barry spent much of his youth travelling, living in 17 addresses by the time he was 36. He lived variously in Cork, Santa Barbara, Barcelona, and Liverpool before settling in Sligo, purchasing and renovating a run-down Royal Irish Constabulary barracks. His decision to settle down was driven primarily by the increasing difficulty in moving large quantities of books from house to house. In Cork Barry worked as a freelance journalist, contributing a regular column to the Irish Examiner. Keen to become a writer, he purchased a caravan and parked it in a field in West Cork, spending the next six months writing what he described as a “terrible novel’.

Barry has described himself as “a raving egomaniac”, one of those “monstrous creatures who are composed 99 per cent of sheer, unadulterated ego” and “hugely insecure and desperate to be loved and I want my reader to adore me, to a disturbing, stalkerish degree.” He is highly ambitious, saying: “I won’t be happy until I’m up there, receiving the Nobel Prize.” He confessed to “haunting bookshops and hiding” to “spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone’s tempted by my sweet bait” and has also placed copies of his own work in front of books by other “upcoming” authors.

In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms. In 2011 he released his debut novel City of Bohane, which was followed in 2012 by the short story collection Dark Lies the Island. Barry won the International Dublin Literary Award for his novel City of Bohane in 2013. When City of Bohane was shortlisted for the award in April 2013, Barry said: “Anything that keeps a book in the spotlight, and keeps people talking about books is good. And a prize with money attached to it has a lot of prestige.”[8][9] He received €100,000 for winning the award. The prize jury included Salim Bachi, Krista Kaer, Patrick McCabe, Kamila Shamsee, Clive Sinclair and Eugene R. Sullivan. Lord Mayor of Dublin Naoise Muirí said he was “thrilled” that someone of “such immense talent [should] take home this year’s award”. Muirí also said the characters were “flamboyant and malevolent, speaking in a vernacular like no other.”

The Gazette described him as: “If Roddy Doyle and Nick Cave could procreate, the result would be something like Kevin Barry.